Seven years before he became the successor to a future Hall of Famer and a starting center in the Super Bowl, the snaps and checks and protections that dot the job description of an offensive line’s most indispensable link never crossed the mind of Cam Jurgens.
Instead, offensive coordinator Travis Schuster schemed up ways to get Jurgens — the star tight end and linebacker at Beatrice High School in Nebraska — the ball as much as possible.
He’d line up as an outside receiver for jump balls.
He’d serve as the down block for “super power,” one of their best running plays. He’d bump back outside to block for jet sweeps, and then switch roles to execute one as the rusher.
There were the jailbreak screens, the slot receiver routes, the fullback traps, the traditional running calls. Anything and everything worked.
And when Jurgens served as a blocking tight end, Schuster and the rest of the Beatrice staff assigned him a poor grade during film sessions if he didn’t knock the defender to the ground or push him off the screen.
At the time, most coaches viewed Jurgens — given his blend of explosiveness and size — as a defensive lineman or tight end beyond high school.
But within his first year with Nebraska in 2018, then-head coach Scott Frost approached him about a switch that helped Jurgens blossom into a second-round pick in 2022 and the Eagles’ eventual replacement for Jason Kelce, the legendary center who retired in March.
It wasn’t exactly a linear path for the small-town Nebraska native who grew up on his family’s farm in Pickrell (population 185) and went to high school in Beatrice (population just over 12,000), but the emergence of Jurgens, who earned the first Pro Bowl nod of his career in 2024 and is just 25 years old, will continue on the sport’s most prominent stage next weekend.
“Sometimes it’s hard to think that it’s real,” Beth Jurgens, his mother, told The Post. “Sometimes it is hard to think that, you know, you’ll go to a bar or go to a restaurant with the TVs going and think, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my kid up there.’ ”
At first, though, Jurgens “questioned the move” to center, former Beatrice head coach Bob Sexton told The Post. When he called Beth and Ted, his father, to tell them, they initially thought it meant going to the Nebraska defensive line. When Jurgens called Schuster, his mind jumped to a similar scenario, too.
“No, I’m gonna touch the ball every play,” Schuster recalled Jurgens saying. “Well I knew right away there was no way he was playing quarterback.”
Jurgens needed to make up for lost time. Other centers had years of snapping experience that Jurgens couldn’t replicate overnight. He needed to navigate any growing pains, such as with the shotgun flicks, and settle into a rhythm. He’d practice with his roommate at Nebraska, Beth said, and eventually, at the start of the 2019 season following a redshirt year, he became the starter.
“You go from a kid where you’re catching touchdown passes or making tackles or dunking a basketball to kind of the position where you’re not glorified in the offensive line,” Sexton said. “But the fact that he had the ball in his hand every down, all eyes were on him. And any mistake you made with a bad snap was magnified.”
As a rookie with the Eagles, he served as Kelce’s backup. In his second year, he slid over and became their starting right guard. But when Kelce announced his retirement in March, Philadelphia’s succession plan — which Beth said they’d always anticipated happening — thrust Jurgens into the spotlight, though Sexton said he wasn’t nervous or worried about replacing one of the best centers in NFL history.
It has quickly become a “dream come true” for Jurgens’ family, Sexton said.
Sunday will mark Jurgens’ second Super Bowl appearance, and he’ll have at least 10 family members and friends in attendance. Jurgens contributed to a line that blocked for Saquon Barkley’s 2,005-yard season.
He even surprised everyone last weekend in the NFC Championship game, when he didn’t play in the first half due to injury but then gutted through the second half once Landon Dickerson — his replacement — exited.
“He can do some things in the NFL right now that there’s not a lot of other centers can do, especially when it comes to his pulling and getting out on the perimeter and stuff like that,” Schuster said. “That’s just that natural athleticism he has. … And then like last week, just when he came in and you knew he was hurting, he’s done that before. You just kinda got that farm kid, Nebraska farm kid toughness. He’ll do whatever it takes for the team to win, and he showed that last week.”
The first two years of Jurgens’ career were shaped by learning from Kelce.
But if the Eagles anticipated a drop-off after Kelce’s exit, Jurgens ensured that never materialized.
