The strip-sack of future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady in the fourth quarter led to a Jake Elliott field goal that gave the Eagles a 41-33 lead with just 1:05 remaining. It is one of the greatest plays in the history of the franchise.

"Wow, what a blue-collar player, an incredible person in the locker room. Loved by everybody," Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Lurie says. "He just gives it his all. It was nice to see him produce one of the most iconic moments, not just for the Eagles, but in NFL history.

"He deserved it. He had done all of the work and timed it. He found the one vulnerability, that moment with Tom, and usurped it. He timed his move perfectly."

"Football turned into something that I did not expect it to turn into," says Tasha Graham, Brandon's mother.

Growing up in Detroit, Brandon was always a bouncing ball of energy. Tasha recalls meeting with Brandon's kindergarten teacher and being told that Brandon, despite getting good grades, would eventually be a discipline problem. Tasha took the criticism to heart. As a single parent, Tasha did everything in her power to keep Brandon on the straight and narrow. She figured that she had to keep Brandon busy or the streets would take care of that.

"When she told me that Brandon was going to have a discipline problem," Tasha recalls, "I said, 'Not on my watch. Not my kid.'"

She would be leery about a lot of stuff because it was Detroit," Brandon says. "She didn't want her son doing anything he wasn't supposed to with people that he shouldn't be with. She would always want to meet my friends and things like that."

"He was always a good kid. He just liked to play with the other kids in class. He always did his work and all of that other stuff. He just liked to play," says Derrick Walton, Brandon's father.

The solution? Football.

It was nearly a short-lived experiment, however. Seven-year-old Brandon was run over by a ballcarrier during a one-on-one drill in a practice during his first year and wanted to quit. Fortunately, for Brandon and the Eagles, his father talked him out of it.

"We made him play his first year out. Once he got the hang of it, he caught on real quick because he was an active kid, I knew he was something special," Walton says. "That first year, I knew he was something special."

Graham's youth football coaches guided him to Detroit's Crockett Vocational Technical High School where he earned All-America honors from a variety of publications. He was also named the Michigan Gatorade Player of the Year at a school that, Graham says, was "hanging by a thread." If the team wanted to practice at night, parents would park their cars along the sideline and use the headlights.

"We loved it. We took care of it," Graham says of Crockett. "It was the struggle, but we still won."

Crockett won the Detroit Public League title and reached the state championship game during Graham's tenure. Graham earned a scholarship to nearby Michigan and became the first defensive player to be named team MVP twice in school history. He was also a second-team All-America selection and first-team All-Big Ten Conference pick as a senior in 2009. He also finished as a finalist for the Ted Hendricks Award, which is given annually to the nation's top college defensive end.

"If you make it through Detroit, you can make it anywhere because it's a rough city to be a part of," Tasha Graham says.

Brandon Graham not only made it. He's thriving. He's got everything he could have ever dreamed of both on and off the field. He's married with two children and is in the prime of his career. It's the relentless passion that he has for life which is why he's the "heart and soul" of the Eagles.