It hadn’t worked out for him in Tennessee, there’s no other way of cutting it. The transition from the college to professional game is a notoriously difficult one, and so it’d proven for the former Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award finalist.
It’s all exceedingly more complex in the NFL, everything’s running at an inconceivable speed and the hits… the hits they hurt like a bomb going off on the disposal team. Between the film study, the bodily pain, the on-field failure and what probably seemed like an endless cycle of the three during his first couple years in the league, he’d clearly fallen out of love with the game of football.
I remember seeing him on one particular Sunday, this was a few games into the season when he’d been demoted from the backup position to emergency QB3. The television broadcast was showing the Titans sideline. The head coach and new backup were so engrossed in the play calling: flipping laminated sheets, confirming play wristbands, shielding mouths, adjusting microphones, thrillingly alive for the 40 seconds of pre-snap coordination.
Then there he was as QB3, you could see him just briefly in the background of the television shot, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t slip off into the injury tent with a little cup of Gatorade and a tablet. The screen of the tablet was facing out, and you could clearly see what was running: Plants Vs. Zombies 2.
Of course this is all well documented. Everyone knows about the league-low QBR among qualifying quarterbacks, the struggles with accuracy and the long nights fueled by Coors Light and Fireball at Nashville honky-tonks followed by erratic days. His heart wasn’t in it, and it was clear that he just couldn’t play any longer for the Tennessee Titans.
Still, it was a shock to see him report to a cube at my office that Monday in October for his new role as Digital Content Strategist and Analyst shortly after being placed on waivers. He said he’d come “to rediscover his love of the game” with an eye towards elevating the connection between our marketing and sales divisions, and it wasn’t long before he was calling us all into a huddle shortly after our 8 a.m. start time. I remember that first huddle clearly.
“Something’s wrong with my one-way speaker,” he said. “I’m not hearing shit out here. Could be the crowd noise.” Then he told Dave, one of our Regional Sales Managers, to run into the President’s office and ask for the play.
In what had been three years at the company so far for me, his first day proved by far and away the most eventful. He lowered his standing desk but didn’t sit down, instead preferring to squat in front of his computer like he was under center. Then you’d intermittently hear shouts coming from his cube: “Check! Check! Check!”he’d scream and “Kill! Kill! Kill!” But mostly everyone listens to their EarPods so it wasn’t too much of a bother. Still, he apologized to us all towards the end of the day, saying he just needed a couple short completions to get into a rhythm out there.
He was certainly a much livelier presence than the previous Digital Content Strategist. The monthly review of digital analytics, which was previously done via a curt email that only sometimes arrived as promised, was now an hour-long session that the President would invariably have to cut off as it approached the hour-and-a-half mark.
He’d be flipping back and forth between slides fashioned out of Google Analytics data points, pointing out potential gaps in blitz coverage assignments and reminding us all that battles were won and lost in the trenches. You could tell he’d get a particular thrill out of Average Session Duration times.
“That’s a helluva sustained drive right there, and last possession is gonna win this ball game!” he’d cry, clapping whoever was nearest on the back and pumping his fist to the heavens. Using a yellow Expo marker, he’d draw big circles around things like Sessions by Device and then he’d look at us all with a wild look in his eye and say, “Who’s picking up the visitors from India?!”
There were moments of confusion. One time, when the hall leading to the bathroom was particularly active one post-lunch period in which pizza had been brought in for the group, he awkwardly slid into the carpet and everyone was worried that he might’ve done major damage to his knee.
He also knocked himself unconscious after performing a five-step drop and slipping on dark ice in our office parking lot after the Holiday party, but he refused to head to the Emergency Room and kept saying something about how “availability is your biggest asset in this league.” He was always worried about an office backup that he didn’t have taking his place.
Over time, he became a very well respected colleague across all divisions. It certainly didn’t hurt things being 6-foot-5, weighing 235 and looking like an All-American Boy with the arm of a howitzer cannon. And he was obviously beloved throughout the warehouse after gifting everyone back there a Rolex for being “the hogs that move the chains.”
He also introduced a level of competition that our C-suite certainly appreciated. Prior to his arrival, everyone was aware of the fact that we had competitors in the market place, but our particular industry was more friendly and collusive than anything else. That wasn’t the case for our new Digital Content Strategist and Analyst: he mentioned our rivals with a hatred that bordered on being fanatical.
He would spend hours combing through the personal LinkedIn profiles of our competitors, looking for what he called “bulletin board material.” If someone had posted something regarding some success, or personal milestone, or even a team outing to Top Golf, he’d print out the post, put in on the thumbtack board that traditionally only held things like emergency exit strategies, basic employee rights, and general HR notifications, and make an announcement to the whole office along the lines of: “Take a look at this clown! Talking shit about our Inc., saying our Inc. was the past but now they’re the future? I’ve fucking had it with this! Let’s show ’em who the real Inc. is around here!”
And then he’d make a cryptic comment under the post from a profile-less LinkedIn burner account he created that would say something like “Your time for honoring yourself will soon be at an end,” and then he’d ask if anyone else in the office with a LinkedIn burner account could go ahead and like the comment.
We were all sad to see him go following his year with us. He couldn’t have been more effusive in his praise for the time he spent with us, saying it’d reignited the passion he had for tossing around the ol’ pigskin. When Pam Oliver asked him to detail how exactly he’d managed to find that spark again, he replied simply: “By normalizing the firmographics.”
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