Roster cutdown day—or, as our new Private Equity NFL partners may refer to it, “strategic reorganization season”—is now upon us. Before we get too deep into the woods, I’d like to send out a plea to all who are consuming and covering the next few days, in which hundreds of people will have lost their jobs and seen their lifelong dreams come to an end.
We’ve long lost the plot here. Did you know that NFL teams actually have sponsors for social media posts about “roster moves,” which is a cool revenue stream until you personalize it and imagine your place of work posting a picture of you during a mass layoff and saying:
TRANSACTION: John returns to the abyss of LinkedIn as financial pressures mount. Sponsored by Jardiance™.
But the move that really bothers me the most is the way we treat the release of former players who were selected high in the draft. The Houston Texans let go of C.J. Henderson on Tuesday, and it was framed by many as “the former first-round pick” C.J. Henderson losing his job. This sets in motion this familiar and comforting (to us) thought cycle that some dude with millions of dollars and a great opportunity let it go to waste. We love to call people “busts.” It’s a little schadenfreude holiday for us.
Of course, this ignores the most wild and obvious truth, which is that it was not C.J. Henderson’s fault someone drafted him at No. 9. He didn’t choose this. He also didn’t choose where he got to go to work, which, in his case, ended up being the Jacksonville Jaguars for two seasons (the latter of which was with Urban Meyer!) and the Carolina Panthers for two seasons. To rephrase that: Henderson played for two of the NFL’s most lost-in-the-abyss franchises during his most formative football years, didn’t get developed, and is now struggling to find his footing in a league that probably never made much sense to him. Caleb Farley, another player in a similar position, got the same treatment.
The Minnesota Vikings are trying to trade Lewis Cine, another first-round pick from 2022. Same deal. Cine was drafted by a green general manager during his first chance to assemble a board. Cine’s defensive coordinator was fired after one year and the replacement, Brian Flores, came in to run a drastically different system.
Let’s talk about that instead of playing roster bean counting. I’m not here to absolve players of personal responsibility and, indeed, there are plenty of players who have come into the league, taken the opportunity for granted and washed out of the profession without tapping their potential. But there are just as many players who were the victim of political crossfire between a general manager who wanted him and a coach who did not (or vice versa), an owner whose kid looked up the guy’s PFF grade and told mom and dad he wasn’t good, or bad coaching where a coach with no business running a room and a poor grip himself on the system he was trying to convey to others.
I’m not saying any one of these things is directly applicable to Cine or Henderson, but I am saying that most people taking potshots are not even bringing up the possibility. This is an information hailstorm devoid of any context or thought, and through these instantaneous bits of nuggetry (my word, I made it up), we continue to let owners, GMs and coaches decide a narrative that they themselves should be partially responsible for.
Imagine blaming someone who played for NFL head coach Urban Meyer for a failure to develop. That’s like firing a pilot for having the spins after his jet got caught in a hurricane.
So, please, today of all days, remember that some of the time when a highly drafted player is let go, that it wasn’t their fault. Remember that people are losing their jobs and will have to give up on what was their life’s purpose to find a new one. That’s hard. Remember that this somber message was brought to you by Anderson Toyota/Nissan. Get cut by your team? Ride out of the parking lot in style with this preowned Tundra for under $35,000.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as On NFL Cutdown Day, Remember These Careers Have Context.
