How a career-ending injury as an NFL linebacker paved the way for Colin Allred’s underdog Senate bid

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Colin Allred lay in excruciating pain on the artificial turf field at Cowboys Stadium, staring up at the massive retractable roof shielding him and 90,000 others from the Arlington heat.

That Sunday afternoon 14 years ago, Allred, a backup Tennessee Titans linebacker, had collided with Cowboys tight end Martellus Bennett while trying to bring down Dallas’ running back, Marion Barber III. Allred knew he had just played his last NFL snap.

“I can remember him saying, this might be it for me. Maybe it’s time for law school,” said Matt Wilson, one of Allred’s closest friends, who attended the game and met with Allred outside the visiting locker room after. “He was calm and collected.”

The hit left Allred, then 27, with a bulging disk that would require surgery to fuse two vertebrae in his neck. And while it ended Allred’s career as a professional football player, the injury also set into motion a new path as a civil rights lawyer that would lead him to a seat in the U.S. House, setting the stage for this year’s defy-the-odds bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz.

Allred is barely two weeks out from the biggest matchup of his life as he aims to take down one of the U.S. Senate’s most well-known Republicans in a state that last saw a Democrat win statewide office three decades ago. Polls paint him as the clear underdog, but Allred is putting up a fight, having out-fundraised Cruz in every quarter since he launched his campaign.

On the campaign trail, Allred has infused his messaging with references to his football background, underscoring the sport’s integral role in his political career. It was part of the narrative he used to launch his upstart bid for Congress seven years ago, when he emphasized that while football was a key financial lifeline for him, “you shouldn’t have to be a ballplayer to get ahead in life.” His identity as a Black, ex-NFL civil rights lawyer made him a natural voice to weigh in on the politically controversial wave of players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality, earning him national exposure as he defended the movement.

Allred speaks during a primary watch party in Dallas for the Senate seat on March 5, 2024. (Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune)

Those closest to Allred say his sports career illustrates a life defined by overcoming uphill battles. Athletes at his Dallas high school, Hillcrest, self-identified as scrappy underdogs who took pride in upsetting more talented opponents in the playoffs. Football gave Allred a full-ride scholarship to Baylor, helping him overcome the economic challenges of being raised by a single mother who worked as a public school teacher. He went undrafted out of college, fighting his way onto the Titans roster by learning to play new positions and spending extra time poring over the playbook. And he won a seat in Congress by unseating a powerful and heavily favored GOP incumbent.

“To run against an incumbent senator in a Republican-heavy state aligns perfectly with his lifelong journey,” said Wilson, who has known Allred since second grade. “The cards have been stacked against him multiple times. But Colin thrives in that situation, and I feel like he's going to find a way to grind out a win again.”

Cruz remains formidable but is taking nothing for granted. While Allred has painted himself as a moderate who would be “tough” on border security and work to protect energy jobs, Cruz is spending millions on ads undercutting that image, arguing Allred’s past comments and votes on issues from immigration to transgender rights belie the centrist ethos he is projecting.

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“I don’t know Congressman Allred. I have no animus for him personally,” Cruz said at last week’s Senate debate. “But I do know his voting record. His voting record is radical and extreme.”

Allred, however, remains optimistic. He says his sports career provides a window into what kind of senator he would be, tying it into his campaign’s steadfast focus on presenting him as a team player who would work across the aisle.

“It'd be helpful if more of our legislators had been in team sports, and particularly in football, because you constantly spend your time being reminded and also understanding that there's something much larger than yourself, and that if you don't do your part, the entire effort falls apart,” Allred said. “Outside of the military, there's not many experiences in the outside world that kind of give you that understanding.”

Hillcrest High

Allred likes to say that it “took a village” to raise him. With his dad out of the picture from the start, Allred, who is biracial, was raised by his mother, Judith Allred, and his aunt and uncle, Tess and Jim Stewart. He grew up in Oak Lawn before eventually moving to North Dallas, at one point living full time with his aunt and uncle.

Allred was obsessed with sports from an early age, envisioning a career playing baseball — his favorite sport — for the Texas Rangers. He would wear No. 34 on his jersey in high school and college in homage to his favorite player, Nolan Ryan, who spent the twilight of his career pitching for the Rangers when Allred was in elementary school.

Allred received first-team all-district honors in baseball and football at Hillcrest High School in Dallas. (Credit: Courtesy of the Allred campaign)

At Hillcrest High School in North Dallas, Allred played baseball, basketball and football.

Dupree Scovell, Allred’s teammate in baseball and football at Hillcrest, said baseball especially came naturally to Allred, recalling how he could hit for power and gun down runners from the outfield with his strong arm. Allred, for his part, said his inability to hit offspeed pitches was his downfall on the diamond — and anyway, his body looked more like that of a linebacker by the time colleges started poking around.

On the football field, Allred thrived and was elevated to a leadership role early. Scovell remembers Allred being “a major part” of the defense his sophomore year — Scovell’s senior year — and helping lead the team to the playoffs after a disappointing season the year before.

Hillcrest embraced the underdog mentality, Scovell said, particularly when matched against more upscale schools nearby.

Allred attempts a diving tackle as a linebacker for the Hillcrest Panthers. (Credit: Courtesy of the Allred campaign)

“We always had a chip on our shoulder against those other types of teams,” Scovell said. “That's part of your DNA. You go play one of those schools, it's like, nobody thinks we should be here. We don't have the same facilities, we’ve got a weight room that doesn’t have air conditioning.”

As a leader on the baseball team, Allred was “vocal when he needed to be, but mainly he just played the game and kind of led by example,” said Mike Tovar, Allred’s high school baseball coach. He said Allred was not easily flustered, recalling a playoff game where Hillcrest was getting blown out by a far more talented Southlake Carroll team, and Tovar, having nowhere else to turn, was forced to bring in Allred, who typically played outfield, for a rare pitching appearance.

“We were getting trounced, and Carroll was very vocal in their dugout,” Tovar said. “We were out of the game. We just had to finish the inning. He just said, give me the ball. He got on the mound and just competed. I think they still hit him hard, but we finally got out of the inning.”

Those who knew Allred in high school say he was clearly primed for something beyond sports — it just wasn’t clear the trajectory would be that of a future congressman. Still, there were signs: Allred was a self-described history buff, taking to the subject his mom taught, and he was class president at Hillcrest. His classmates voted him “most likely to succeed” in the senior yearbook, according to Wilson.

“I knew that whatever he would decide to focus on in adulthood, he would be successful because of just his determination,” Wilson said.

Baylor

Allred ended high school on a high note, leading Hillcrest football to a 10-1 record in 2000. But in his early years in college, he struggled. He had to put in extra work to keep up with classes for the biology pre-med degree he was pursuing. And he redshirted his sophomore year, missing the season with an injury.

“I kind of lost my way in terms of what I thought would make me successful as a player,” Allred said of his first couple years at Baylor. “I thought that I needed to get big, and I put on too much weight. I started playing defensive end, and I even spent some time at tackle in certain pass rush situations. It was just crazy.”

Allred slimmed down heading into his third year on the field — “the year that NFL scouts started taking notice of me,” he said — and switched his major to pursue a history degree, with an eye toward going to law school. It was a more natural fit for Allred, who recalled with a laugh that he went the pre-med route because he had been encouraged to become a doctor or lawyer growing up, and the extent of his thinking at the time was, “well, you know, doctors make good money.”

With the change, Allred said, “I felt much more comfortable. I was having a lot more fun in school, and I also felt like I took off on the football field. It all kind of came together at the same time.”

The Baylor football team, which Allred said had fallen into “chaos,” went a combined 2-22 in the Big 12 over Allred’s first three years. But by 2005, his final season with the Bears, things finally started turning around.

Allred, who was selected team captain, got the coaches’ support to enact an “accountability system” where players would be punished for missing summer workouts. The system helped curb what Allred described as a major delinquency problem with summer workouts, and primed the team for a more respectable season.

Allred wore No. 34 in high school and as a Baylor Bear in honor of his hero, legendary pitcher Nolan Ryan. (Credit: Courtesy of the Allred campaign)

“At first, there was a lot of resistance to it,” Allred said. “But then guys started to buy in, and it became a thing where, I think by the end, we took pride in being a team that was scrappy, that could play to the end, and that even if we weren't as talented as Oklahoma or Texas or A&M, that we were at least not going to be out there physically spent.”

It was Allred’s breakout year statistically — 73 tackles, 5.5 sacks and an interception return for a touchdown in his last game against Oklahoma State. Baylor finished the season 5-6, a couple overtime losses away from a 7-4 record.

The NFL

After college, Allred was ready to move on from football. Passed over in the 2006 NFL draft, he signed on with the Titans as a free agent but was cut after training camp. He applied to law school, but before he could start at Berkeley Law, the Titans invited him to training camp again the following year for a second go.

That time, Allred earned a spot on the practice squad and was elevated to the Titans near the end of the year. He played three more seasons, racking up 46 tackles in 32 games — including two starts.

Allred earned his staying power by learning to play special teams and all three types of linebacker positions: middle, strong-side and weak-side. Dave McGinnis, Allred’s linebacker coach, said he grasped play concepts quickly and could be trusted to be in the right place on kickoff coverage — and, McGinnis said, the versatility certainly helped.

“We've got a saying in the National Football League: the more you can do, the longer you stay,” McGinnis said. “And he took that to heart.”

Before long, though, injuries flared up, with a concussion followed by ankle and neck troubles. He had a few collisions on kickoff returns where he lost feeling in parts of his body, then the hit in the Dallas game left him with what he described as a “severe stinger” that ended his career.

“I've had bones, I've had muscles, I've had ligaments. There's nothing worse than nerve pain,” Allred said. “I was just lying there thinking, I know this is it. I'm not gonna be able to keep going like this.”

Allred has long been forthcoming about his lack of talent compared to most NFL defenders. In the video announcing his congressional bid, he said he was “never the biggest, the fastest or the strongest” and “had to outwork everyone” to muscle his way onto the Titans roster. He once told an NFL interviewer he was “just happy to be here, to be honest.”

Wilson, who also played baseball and football with Allred at Hillcrest, said that while Allred was athletically gifted, he did not receive a litany of offers from top Division I college programs — rather, it was a handful of lower-level offers and Baylor, which went 2-9 overall the year before Allred came to campus.

“He ended up making a name for himself, and becoming an all-Big 12 linebacker and a captain of the team when [at first] they were a lower-end team,” Wilson said. “Then he ends up playing five years in the NFL, not because he was the most talented guy on the field, but because he studied the playbook better than anybody else.”

An emerging political career

U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, arrives before a House Judiciary Select Subcommittee hearing on the weaponization of the federal government, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023. (Credit: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via REUTERS)

After the injury-wracked 2010 season, Allred turned to law school. At Berkeley, he met his wife, Aly Eber, when they were assigned to review each other’s papers in a “Law of Democracy” class.

Allred at first considered going into sports law, he told an interviewer in 2018, but his interest in civil rights and politics was sparked by reading then-President Barack Obama’s memoir — which featured Obama’s musings on civil rights and his background, shared with Allred, as a biracial child raised by a white mother. Allred also drew inspiration from working as a researcher for a professor’s book about how politicians use “coded racial appeals” to win votes.

“In terms of a political career, I think that was something that others saw in him,” Eber said. “I think he cared about the substantive issue of voting rights, of democracy. But he was not a person saying, you know, ‘I'm going to go be a politician one day.’”

Allred’s first major foray into Texas politics came in 2014, soon after he graduated law school, when he worked as a voter protection lawyer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis and Battleground Texas, a Democratic political group.

That role came on the heels of Texas’ 2011 voter ID law that required voters to show certain types of identification before their ballots could be counted. Allred, who registered Texans to vote and helped voters comply with the new ID provisions, recalled working with people who were eligible to vote but lacked a valid ID because their driver’s license had expired or they had yet to swap their out-of-state ID for a Texas card.

“I remember the costs that they were having to incur — you know, it was $15 here, $20 there,” Allred said of the state fees voters would have to pay to obtain a birth certificate, which they would then use to get their ID card. “And it did remind me of some of the stories that I'd read about poll taxes and folks having a financial cost associated with trying to vote in Texas. And I did feel like that was wrong. I thought it was un-American.”

Allred later took a role at a high-powered Democratic law firm, Perkins Coie, where he spent more than a year working as a voting rights litigator. Then, in the waning months of the Obama administration, Allred left to become a special assistant at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under then-Secretary Julián Castro, working on government-backed mortgage aid and Section 8 vouchers for low-income renters.

It was Trump’s election, and increasingly favorable demographic trends in GOP Rep. Pete Sessions’ district, that spurred Allred to run for Congress. He ran with the backing of his two former bosses, Castro and Davis.

Scovell, Allred’s high school teammate and now an executive at a Dallas real estate development company, remembers calling Allred up after he announced his bid against Sessions. Scovell asked: Was Allred running just to get his name out, with the goal of improving his odds for a second run against Sessions in two years? Or did he actually think he could win on the first go-around?

“I love his response — frankly, it was such a Hillcrest come-from-behind underdog response,” Scovell said. “He’s like, ‘man, I’m not running to get known. I’m running to win. I wouldn’t be in it if I wasn’t.’”

Allred at a campaign watch party on March 5, 2024. (Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune)