Eagles’ Jason Kelce: ‘You’d Be Surprised’ How Many NFL Players Believe Earth Is Flat

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Professional athletes are always looking to science if they think it will help them get an on-field advantage, but some of them are pretty quick to dismiss it in the real world.

Case in point is Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce recalling on the latest episode of the New Heights podcast presented by Wave Sports + Entertainment (starts at 62:30 mark) a conversation he had with a coach last year in which he said “you’d be surprised” how many people in the NFL believe the earth is flat:

“I was on the practice field last year and one of our coaches was walking by and I was like ‘Man, how many people do you think on this field believe the Earth is flat?’ And he was like ‘I don’t think–there’s nobody out here that believes that.’ I was like ‘you’d be surprised, if you start polling, you’d be surprised.’ And before I even finished that, somebody right next to me said, ‘I mean how you know it isn’t?'”

There have been so many athletes who have bought in to the flat-earth conspiracy that Aaron Earlywine of Sports Illustrated wrote an article about it in 2017.

One player who might have been happy to engage Kelce in a discussion about the topic is Eagles cornerback Darius Slay. The five-time Pro Bowler has gone on record as saying he thinks the earth is flat.

Luckily, there are people out there to answer the question of how we know the earth is round.

Patrick McGurrin, a neuroscientist and clinical professor at the University of Maryland, explained you could look outside, assuming no buildings were in the way, and “see another city that’s hundreds of miles away” or “a ship sailing out to sea” if the earth were flat.

You could also just look at images of the earth that have been taken during various space missions over the years, but then that would probably lead to a separate discussion from the conspiracy-theorists about how the moon landing was faked.