Cam Jurgens path to becoming Jason Kelces successor as Eagles starting center

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...