Fear And Loathing On The Football Field

Or “What To Do When You Don’t Have That Dog In You"

We’re currently in the heart of football season.  Teams at every level, from the NFL down to high school, are playing meaningful games that will define their seasons and shape the memories they carry forward.  It’s an incredibly vibrant time of year to be a football player.  I should know, I used to be one.  Kind of.

I “played” football in college.  I put “played” in quotes because I never actually stepped onto the field for any meaningful snaps during my college years.  Telling people I played football in college (No quotation marks) feels intellectually dishonest, even though it’s technically true.  It feels more accurate to say “I was on the football team in college.”  I don’t want anyone to think I’m misrepresenting my athletic prowess here.

You might be thinking “Well, that sucks you didn’t play in college, but you must have been pretty great in high school, right?  Even college benchwarmers were the best players on their high school team.”  That’s a nice thought, but it’s also not true.  

I wasn’t the best player on my high school team.  I don’t think I was even in the Top 20.  I was a role player at best.  My most prominent attributes on the football field as a defensive end were my height (Six foot five, thank you very much) and the fact that I cared a lot.  I certainly wasn’t the most talented player on the team, but I was probably the most emotional.

After hearing that, you might now be thinking, “If you weren’t great in high school, what the hell were you doing on the football team in college?”  That is a question I’ve been asking myself for the last twenty years, ever since I graduated high school and began my college football odyssey.

Even though I wasn’t that good in high school, I didn’t want my playing days to end with graduation.  There was something about football that kept calling to me.  It wasn’t just the game itself, it was the entire experience.  I loved the offseason, the preparation, the transformation that takes place from one year to the next.  I loved the pre-game moments in the locker room, everyone getting locked in before exploding out onto the field.  I loved the feelings of euphoria that came after a major victory.  I loved the parties that immediately followed those victories.  I loved all of it.  I got addicted to the football experience, and I wanted to keep it going.  

I ended up finessing a roster spot at a small Division III college along with a few other high school teammates.  “Maybe I’m one of those late bloomers,” I thought.  “Maybe I can become a great college player.”  Lo and behold, I wasn’t any good in college either, no matter how hard I worked in the offseason.

My body completely changed.  I went from a lean 210 pounds to a sturdy 250 with more speed, explosion, and strength.  But my output remained the same.  Ultimately, I just wasn’t a very good football player.  So I spent two seasons on the bench, getting into three games during mop up duty and making exactly zero tackles.

After those two seasons, I ended up transferring to a Division I ACC school, ostensibly to attend as a regular student.  But in the back of my mind I had a crazy idea.  “What if I tried out for the football team?”  Apparently, I hadn’t had enough sense beaten into me yet.

Maybe my idea wasn’t crazy enough though, because my acceptance onto the football team was much easier than I anticipated.  While I was on campus for my summer orientation, I met with the defensive line coach and told him that I intended to try out for the team when I arrived at school in the fall.  I eventually got a call from him a couple weeks later, asking me to come to summer training camp.  

Apparently, a few defensive linemen had left the program and they needed bodies in their absence.  That’s where I came in.  A body to fill empty space, nothing more.  I wasn’t going to be on scholarship, obviously, but I would still get to strap on the pads and head out onto the practice field with all of the real players.  Within a span of two seasons, I went from high school role player to Division III benchwarmer to Division I student-athlete.  None of it made any sense, but it happened, somehow.

Unfortunately, the joy I felt once my insane dream became a reality was short lived.  I realized, very quickly, that I was completely out of my depth.  I was out of my depth physically, but I was also out of my depth psychologically.

I knew I was in trouble during my first installment of “Freshman Fridays,” a weekly workout meant to inaugurate new players into the team’s culture.  I wasn’t a freshman, but it was my first year on the team, so I had to participate.  

Every Friday, we all had to gather in the weight room at 5am and endure a grueling two hour workout which was specifically designed to break us mentally and physically.  It was so far beyond any type of training I had done up to that point in my life, and I was unable to handle it.  

I have a distinct memory, about an hour and forty five minutes into the first workout, after having already thrown up half an hour prior, of not being able to stand in between sets of power cleans.  Instead, I was on my knees, literally weeping at the difficulty of the task placed before me, mentally unable to push through the physical exhaustion.  Other players were struggling, but I was clearly having the hardest time with it.  I had distinguished myself from my peers, and not in a positive way.

It was like this every week.  I would get demolished every day in practice by guys who were bigger, stronger, and tougher than me, and then I would top it off by humiliating myself even further in front of a bunch of freshmen on Friday mornings.  I could not assert myself in any way whatsoever.  The only logical conclusion one could draw from witnessing all of this is that being a Division I college football player was clearly not meant for me.

Even though I was miserable, I never entertained the notion of quitting.  I showed up every day and endured what I had to endure, and eventually things improved, slightly.  I got my feet under me in the spring and started to fare better in workouts.  I would still throw up more times than not, but I was much more effective at maintaining my composure.

But there was always a hard ceiling to what I was capable of.  I have another distinct memory, this time during the summer heading into my senior season.  We were doing a workout where we had to drag weighted sleds back and forth across a football field, on our hands and knees, in the hot July sun.  I remember stopping at midfield at one point, needing to vomit and take a moment to recover.  It was then that I looked over to my left and saw one of our starting cornerbacks, all five foot nine and 175 pounds of him, dragging a sled across the field with relentless intensity, carrying more weight than I was, screaming out loud, to no one but himself, “GOTTA EAT!  GOTTA EAT!”

“You know,” I thought to myself, watching in awe, vomit dribbling down my chin, “I have a pretty solid work ethic.  I know how to commit to something and show up every time.  It’s a good quality to have.  But I do not have THAT, whatever that is.”

THAT, in modern parlance, is called “Having that dog in you.”

It’s that fierce mental tenacity, a refusal to back down, almost to the point of insanity.  Most everyone on a Division I football team has it, otherwise they wouldn’t have been offered a scholarship in the first place.  But some guys clearly have it more than others.  All of the players on my team in that upper echelon went on to play professional football in some capacity.  The cornerback I mentioned above was a little too small to make it in the NFL, but he ended up having an outstanding multi-year career in the Arena Football League.  

But I did not have “that dog” in me at all, and it was readily apparent.  I knew how to set big goals, how to consistently pursue them, and how to show up on time every day and do the little things right.  But when push came to shove, when I was in the weight room or out on the field, hitting my physical limits, and I had to summon something deep within me to keep going, I came up empty.

I once heard an interview with comedian Gary Gulman where he discussed his short-lived stint as a tight end at Boston College.  He summed up my entire college football experience in one sentence: “It was quite clear early on to the other players that I wasn't like them.”  I knew exactly what he was talking about.  Athletes can sniff out who does and doesn’t have “that dog” in them.  If you don’t have it, you get treated with a low-level disdain that’s so pointed, it feels like it’s directly asking you “What are you even doing here?”

It’s a great question.  What was I even doing there?  Why not just be a regular student and enjoy my college experience like everybody else?  Why did I put myself in a situation where I was clearly out of my depth?  Why did I subject myself to all of that physical pain and mental humiliation?  Was it just so I could wear the jersey and run out of a tunnel in front of sixty thousand people a handful of times over two seasons?  How could that possibly be worth it?

Maybe the most fundamental question here is this: Why did I respond to every failure in my football career by attempting to up the difficulty level?

There is an answer, and it’s not based on logic or rationality.

I think I knew, subconsciously, that all of this would pay off eventually.  It wasn’t going to pay off on the football field, that was for sure.  But it was going to pay off later on in my life when it was applied to who I truly was and what I actually wanted to do.  Those workouts weren’t getting me ready for the next season, they were getting me ready for the next fifty years of my life.

I am not a natural athlete, physically or mentally.  My interests are much more cerebral.  When it comes down to it, I’d rather go to the park to lay out and read a book than to go play pickup basketball.  If I’m going to wake up at 5am, I’d prefer to spend that time writing while the sun rises instead of running stadium stairs to the point of exhaustion.  But just because my natural interests and instincts aren’t based in the physical doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from the physical.

As I mentioned in my last post, I believe that “philosophy begins in the body.”  By pushing myself physically, I can achieve a level of mental clarity and sense of agency that informs the rest of my life.  There’s something about physically exhausting yourself that is incredibly purifying.  It’s like you burn out all of the dead wood in your spirit.  

I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this when I was 18 years old, but I believe that’s what I was chasing after during my four years “playing” college football.  The goal wasn’t to crush all of my workouts and make great plays out on the field in front of tens of thousands of fans.  That was never going to happen.  The goal was to endure, build character and instill a sense of belief in myself that I could apply to the things that I was naturally inclined towards.  And I know I did that.  When I think of the kid who stepped onto the practice field for his first day of training camp at that Division III school and compare him to the guy who walked off the field after the last game of his senior season (a nationally televised bowl game, no less), I see a completely different person.  I see a man better equipped to go out and attempt to craft the life that he wanted, all because of those strenuous physical and mental tests he had to endure.

When you’ve been through 12 weeks of Freshman Fridays, doing stand-up comedy in New York City, writing a Substack, or just getting up and going to work every day is a walk in the park.

I may not have “that dog” in me when it comes to athletics, but I have something in there, something that allows me to constantly work and strive towards things that are meaningful to me.  And I know that part of me is stronger because of those workouts and practices that I endured.  That discipline didn’t just appear, it was cultivated. If I had never played football, it wouldn’t be as strong as it is today.

I can choose to look at my college football career in one of two ways.  I can see it as an embarrassment, four years of a delusional kid trying to be something he obviously wasn’t.  Or I can see it as a forging of my personal character.  I wasn’t out there competing with the other players, that was never going to turn out in my favor.  I was competing with myself, trying to become the version of me that I needed to become in order to set me up for the rest of my life.

That’s the framing that I’ve decided to choose when I look back on my football career.  When it’s still paying dividends, motivating me and enforcing my sense of self twenty years later, why look at it any other way?