04 Feb Getting to Know Mitchell Schwartz
Jewish football player Mitchell Schwartz is a Super Bowl champion after Kansas City’s 31-20 victory Sunday over San Francisco in Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium.
Schwartz, who was the Chiefs’ starting right tackle in his first Super Bowl appearance, has played eight NFL seasons after being selected out of Cal in the second round of the 2012 NFL Draft by Cleveland. He played his first four NFL campaigns with the Browns before signing as a free agent with Kansas City prior to the 2016 campaign. Schwartz has started all 128 regular-season games possible and all seven postseason contests the Chiefs have played during his first four seasons in Kansas City with his regular-season run of 128 consecutive regular-season starts the third-longest active streak in the NFL. He also played in his first 7894 consecutive regular season offensive snaps until that streak finally came to an end when an injury forced him out of a road loss at Tennessee on Nov. 10, 2019.
Name: Mitchell Bryan Schwartz
Born: June 8, 1989 (age 30) in Pacific Palisades, California
Height: 6 ft 5 in
Weight: 320 lb
Position: Offensive tackle
Salary: Signed a 3 year, $24,455,000 contract with the Kansas City Chiefs, including a $11,250,000 signing bonus, $17,500,000 guaranteed, and an average annual salary of $8,151,667.
FAST FACTS ABOUT THE SCHWARTZS:
• Both Mitchell & Geoff grew up in West Los Angeles as a practicing Conservative Jew and attended Adat Shalom.
• Mitchell’s hebrew name is Mendel.
• Mitchell’s older brother, Geoff Schwartz, also played in the NFL.
• Both Geoff and Mitchell love to cook.
• Geoff and Mitchell Schwartz aren’t the first pair of Jewish brothers to play in the National Football League — they’re just the first to do so since 1923.
• In the book that both brothers wrote, “Eat My Schwartz: Our Story of NFL Football, Food, Family, and Faith” the brothers quote their mother, attorney Olivia Goodkin, on her eventual acceptance of her sons’ football fate, given that each stood well over six feet tall at his bar mitzvah.“‘ I started out worrying that they were going to get hurt — but then I realized it was the other players I should be worrying about,” she said. “‘They were like trucks hitting small cars. And I started to kind of feel like maybe this was their destiny.’”
• Geoff jokes that “His size comes from a childhood that included an excess of matzah ball soup, latkes, and tons of white rice.But of course my brother’s similar physique suggests that genetics had plenty to do with it.”