Chris Long played eight of his 11 NFL seasons with the St. Louis Rams, playing most of his best football with the team that drafted him second overall in 2008. But he finished his career with the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles, winning one Super Bowl with each team.
Now retired and in the media space, Long watches football as a fan and analyst. He’ll be locked in to Sunday’s Rams-Eagles game in Philadelphia, but he won’t be rooting for his original team in this matchup.
He’s pulling for the Eagles.
During an appearance on “Pardon My Take”, Long explained that despite having no bad blood with the Rams or hatred toward the organization whatsoever, his “heart’s with the Eagles.”
“Super weird because playing there the last two years of my career, when St. Louis cut me after eight years and moved, it felt like to me, all right, well I am a Ram and I do feel a lot of pride when I watch Jared Verse play or Byron Young or the two interior guys,” he said. “I take pride in, like, ‘Oh, there’s another group in horns like our D-line back in the day.’ There is a sense of pride there, and I still talk to people in that organization. I have no bad blood. But when the team moves across the country, it just doesn’t feel like home as much. You don’t get out there.”
The Chris Long Bowl is going down this weekend @JOEL9ONE pic.twitter.com/NN6PEyLWz8
— Pardon My Take (@PardonMyTake) January 17, 2025
Long added that he’s cognizant of how much the city of St. Louis despises Stan Kroenke and the entire franchise for leaving in 2016, noting that people there “have Super Bowl parties without the game on.”
“That’s how much they hate Stan Kroenke and the LA Rams and the concept of it,” he said. “For me, I don’t have that same vitriol. I was actually supposed to go out last week and be ‘Legend of the Game’ and of course, the game gets moved. Forest fires. The whole thing. So that got rain checked, and I ended up in Philly.”
Long only spent two years with the Eagles, but those were his final two seasons and he loves the city of Philadelphia. He doesn’t have that same love toward Los Angeles, never having played for the Rams after they moved from St. Louis.
“When I go to Philly, man, it just feels like home,” he said. “It’s like the most recent thing I did and that city, what we did there, excuse me for really enjoying being there. … The feeling you get when you go back, it’s hard for me to say my heart’s with anybody but the Eagles.”
All that said, Long expects it to be a great game between his two former teams and still believes Matthew Stafford is a top-tier quarterback.
“I think it’s going to be a great game and I think Matt Stafford’s one of the best quarterbacks left in the damn playoffs.”
