Newly arrived Eagles defensive end Robert Quinn could play 18 games this season.
Quinn has started all seven games for the Bears this year, and he was traded to the Eagles this week. The Eagles have already had their bye and the Bears have not, so the Eagles have 11 more games to play. If Quinn plays in all of them, he’ll have played in 18 games.
That wasn’t possible for most of NFL history, but with the NFL now playing 17 games over 18 weeks, it’s now possible any time a player moves from a team that hasn’t had its bye to a team that has.
When the NFL played 16 games over 17 weeks, several players played in 17 games in a season, including Emmanuel Sanders with the Broncos and 49ers in 2019 and Jerry Rice with the Raiders and Seahawks in 2004.
The NFL record for games played in a season is actually 19, set by four players on the Frankford Yellow Jackets in the 1920s, when teams could set their own schedules and Frankford typically played more games than the rest of the league.
