Marcus Hayes: Milton Williams, Josh Sweat told me before Eagles won Super Bowl LIX they expected hundreds of millions in free agency

Marcus Hayes, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Mar 10, 2025

Published in Football

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NEW ORLEANS — This one gets a dateline, because its origin is the Big Easy.

For most of Super Bowl week, Milton Williams and Josh Sweat shared a table during the Eagles’ interview availability in a partitioned ballroom on the third floor of the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, where the team lived before it dismantled the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX. That is, before Williams and Sweat led the defense that dismantled two-time defending champions Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes.

Both players looked forward to the game, which they figured would be the biggest of their lives. Sweat had been neutralized two years earlier in Super Bowl LVII. This was his mulligan. Williams, at the end of his second season then, played just 12 defensive snaps in that game.

After an inconsistent 2024 season in which he was overshadowed by rookies and journeymen, Sweat, in his seventh season, knew Super Bowl LIX would be his last chance to impress the league’s general managers for what surely would be his last big contract.

After four years as a third-round backup behind veterans Fletcher Cox and Javon Hargrave, then first-rounders Jalen Carter and Jordan Davis, Williams had collected a career-best five sacks in 2024, but he knew the big game would be his best chance to punctuate his value on what surely will be his biggest NFL payday.

So, in the final minutes of their last day of media availability, I asked Sweat for a prediction of that table’s worth come noon March 10.

He paused. Then he smiled, flashing a diamond-encrusted canine on the left side of his mouth.

“Two hunnert.”

Sorry?

“Two hundred. Two hundred million.”

Whew. OK.

Milt?

“Yeah, man, what he said,” Williams replied. “I mean, at least.”

Well, almost; $180 million, it turned out.

Williams agreed to a $104 million deal with the Patriots and Sweat got $76.4 million from the Cardinals, league sources confirmed Monday. Both are four-year deals.

Both are superb values for the new employers.

Both players told me they believed that they were playing their last game for the Birds. They expected the team to bank on Carter, Davis, Nolan Smith, Jalyx Hunt and Moro Ojomo, all younger players, the first three of whom almost certainly will get big-time extensions in near future. They also expected the team to prioritize re-signing linebacker Zack Baun, which it did.

They went out with a bang.

Williams sacked Mahomes in the second and fourth quarters, the second one a strip-sack. He tied his career high in sacks.

Sweat was much more dramatic. He delivered the Eagles’ first of six sacks in the game in the middle of the second quarter, then shared a sack on the very next play. On the play after that, shaken, facing third-and-long, Mahomes threw the interception that turned the game Philly’s way for good: a pick-6 by Cooper DeJean that will live in Eagles lore forever. That made it 17-0, and the rout was on.

And the big payday was inevitable.

Jalen Hurts won the Super Bowl MVP award, and he certainly played well enough to deserve it, but the Eagles defense shut out Mahomes, Reid and Travis Kelce for the first 44 minutes, 26 seconds of the game. If the MVP could have gone to a group, then this defense deserved it. And if it might have been shared, as it was by Cowboys defenders Harvey Martin and Randy White after Super Bowl XII, then Williams and Sweat deserved to share it.

It’s difficult to describe the measured confidence exuded by Williams and Sweat that Thursday morning in a convention hotel a block off the west bank of the Mississippi River.

It took all of the humility and discipline they could muster to keep the Eagles, especially their top-ranked defense, and defenders like Sweat and Williams, from predicting the 40-22 blowout that unfolded. For two weeks they afforded the Chiefs the respect due an organization with three recent Super Bowl wins, the game’s best coach, and the game’s best quarterback.

But, for the first time in years, the Chiefs arrived in the postseason with a subpar offensive line, and that made all the difference. That didn’t keep the Chiefs and their supporters and the oddsmakers from assuming that the Lombardi Trophy was headed back to Kansas City.

“They were talking all that [stuff], but we knew,” Williams told me on the field afterward. “We knew.”

Sweat added a sack early in the third quarter, setting a career best for himself with 2 1/2.

On the Superdome field in the moments following the final gun, I asked Drew Rosenhaus, Sweat’s agent, how much money he thought Sweat had just made for himself. Rosenhaus rolled his eyes and said, “A lot!”

Then he walked over to hug his guy.

When he was done with Rosenhaus, I asked Sweat if I could tell the story of him predicting the $200 million payday he anticipated three days before.

“Naw, man,” he said, that tooth flashing again with a smile so wide you could see the tooth behind it was bejeweled, too. “Not until after we get paid.”

They got paid.

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