Malcolm Jenkins had just turned 24 a few weeks earlier and was making his first career playoff start.

It was Saints-Lions at the Superdome in a 2011 wild-card game at the Superdome.

Jenkins went out there with the intention of making a bunch of big plays.

The opposite happened.

I made [that] mistake early in my career, trying to do too much,” Jenkins said. “You want to start making those splash plays and things like that, but it really comes down to who can execute the small things in the big pressure situations and oftentimes the hype and hoopla makes you lose site of just the small things, your technique, your details. … After that I realized it’s as simple as let the game come to you.

The Saints wound up beating the Lions, 45-28, that day, but Jenkins says now it was one of the two worst playoff performances of his career.

Jenkins has won two Super Bowls and played in 11 postseason games, and nobody is going to be more honest about his performance.

Just doing too much,” he said. “Just trying to make too many plays. Searching for things instead of just kind of letting the game to you, and you end up having a bad game, and obviously the playoffs aren’t the time to have a bad game. The way you do that is focusing on the task at hand, the small things that focused on to get you here, and not letting the circumstances and the pressure get to you.

That was nine years ago, but Jenkins learned a lesson that he carries around with him today.

A lesson he shared with the younger players on the Eagles this week.

The biggest thing is you want to convince young players that it’s no different [than the regular season], because it isn’t,” Jenkins said. “The only thing that’s different is the fanfare and the looming doom of your season, but the game is all the same really just trying to convince them that it’s no different than the last month that we’ve been in and get them to focus more on the task at hand and the context of the situation.

This team does have a fair amount of playoff experience.

Some 18 players on the current 53-man roster have played in at least four playoff games. But 26 of them, including five projected offensive starters, have never experienced NFL playoff football.

Jenkins is one of only four active players to win a Super Bowl for two different teams, and he’s the only active player to win two Super Bowls with neither one coming with the Patriots. This is his sixth trip to the playoffs in the last 11 years.

He's been through this so many times. He gets it. He knows better than almost anybody else what it takes to win in January and February.

And he knows that for the Eagles to get past the Seahawks Sunday, his his message has to get through.

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