Is There Life After Football?

by James A. Holstein

  Given the chance and the choice, both Koonce and Oriard cultivated varied opportunities rather than immersing themselves totally in football. To invoke a useful cliché, both chose to keep other irons in the fire while pursuing their NFL dreams. “Educate and prepare,” said Hakeem Chapman. “Change the focus from your game to your job. . . . You have everything you need, just refocus it.” Oriard and Koonce got the message. Neither was totally “institutionalized” or completely swallowed up by the NFL and its culture. The NFL player ethos didn’t rule their lives with an iron hand. It wasn’t mediocrity that insured their futures. It was diversification: their defiance of totalization.

  Forging the Future

  Clearly, there’s life after football, and for many former NFL players, it’s full, rich, and rewarding. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Some of the post-career pitfalls we’ve seen leave us with grave reservations. Our qualms stem from seeing players close down options and make short-sighted or poorly informed choices among limited alternatives. The pertinent question, from our vantage point, is what might be done to enhance players’ lives when they finish playing? Can they have better lives after football, where players and their families won’t be overwhelmed by physical injury, financial woes, bleak job prospects, and social voids?

  Certainly post-career plans, programs, and opportunities play a role, and the NFL and NFLPA have finally stepped up to take responsibility for helping players transition to the future. They’re encouraging education, work training and experience, internships, media training, investment advice, financial management, and even “life coaching.” While there’s still room for improvement, opportunities are there for the taking.

  But there’s even greater need for change within the NFL bubble and its prevailing culture. We’ve argued that one key to successfully transitioning out of the NFL is to resist the league’s totalizing tendencies. That means being wary of going “all in,” even when that’s the optimal strategy for succeeding in the game itself. In nearly all walks of life, when a person is “all in,” it’s challenging to get out with any degree of success.

  Prisons and the military are two well-know “totalizing” institutions. Even more than the NFL, they command all aspects of players’ lives; their cultures are all encompassing. Reintegration problems for their “exes” are famously difficult, but they may be instructive. The prison literature, for example, stresses two major “reentry” challenges faced by those going back to the “real world.” First, “prisonization” is a functional adaptation to the institutional and cultural demands of “the inside,” but it inhibits success on the outside. Second, the more “prisonized” the individual, the more difficulty he or she has reentering normal society. Deeply socialized and enculturated, those who are “prisonized” have lost the tools to rejoin society. We aren’t claiming that NFL players are fully “prisonized” and it would be unfair—and maladaptive—to ask them to reject unilaterally the demands of the NFL, its culture and ethos. But in light of recent developments, perhaps it’s reasonable to suggest that the NFL culture better align itself with wider cultural values, mores, and practices.

  We’re not suggesting a wholesale abandonment of the NFL ethos, just a tempering of the violence, coarseness, hypermasculinity, and excess that dominates life in and around the NFL. A continued insistence, for example, on defying injury and emphasizing toughness borders on pathological. Bodies, if not lives, are severely endangered—as the recent concussion controversy demonstrates—in ways that are counterproductive for the game, its players, and its alumni. The crude vulgarity of locker room culture and its hypermasculine, homophobic atmosphere strikes most outsiders as outrageous. The compulsion to live large is hard for outsiders to comprehend. To the extent that the NFL can curb these excesses to bring locker room culture more in line with workplace cultures in the wider world, the better chance NFL players have to succeed in that wider world.

  It may increase the NFL’s chances of thriving as well. With today’s concern about the league’s antisocial images and culture of violence—where players themselves resist nearly all safety measures that might impugn their toughness or masculinity—there’s a growing apprehension about football’s future viability. While it appears to be a thriving financial enterprise, a recent NBC poll found that 40 percent of American parents would steer their kids away from playing football.83 Whereas this would have minimal impact in the immediate future, without the conveyor belt from peewee football, to high school, to colleges, the player supply chain might eventually dry up.

  In 2014, the NFL finds itself under scrutiny on myriad fronts. The concussion controversy, the Richie Incognito debacle, and the addition of its first openly gay player, however, present opportunities to reconfigure some cultural components in ways that might keep players from becoming so culturally isolated in the bubble that they can’t function outside. It’s a chance for the league itself to check its totalizing tendencies, allowing players to exercise discretion and responsibility in ways that will help them better prepare for life after football. Fifteen-yard penalties for on-field racial slurs aren’t the answer.

  For their part, players need aggressively to promote these changes themselves. They should recognize and revamp some of the more limiting and debilitating aspects of the NFL ethos as they expand their own personal horizons. To remain captivated by the “gloried self” is immensely and immediately gratifying, but ultimately, the NFL spotlight fades for most of them. Just as they should diversify their financial and career options, they need multidimensional selves that can serve them well once the cheering stops and they’re confronted by an increasingly diverse social world. Their talent and potential are boundless, and their opportunities today are burgeoning. Former players simply need to move forward to claim new limelights in multifaceted lives after football.

  APPENDIX 1

  METHODOLOGY

  This book offers a naturalistic examination of former NFL players’ lives during and after their playing days. It aims to understand players’ social realities on their own terms. Such an approach seeks rich descriptions of lives in relation to the actual circumstances in which they unfold. The focus is mainly on what those lives and realities are like from players’ perspectives—that is, the phenomenological complexity of those worlds. To that end, the primary data for the study are former players’ personal narratives about their experiences as they prepared for and played out their football careers, then moved into the uncertainty of life after football.1

  From this perspective, we conducted approximately 50 life history interviews with NFL players and former players. As a former player, George Koonce had unprecedented access to research subjects and took the lead in forging research relationships. He also conducted most of the interviews—generally in one-on-one situations, but occasionally with one of the other researchers participating.

  The interviews varied in their formality, structure, and timing. Approximately 30 were prearranged as more or less formal interviews. The others were more impromptu, being set up “on the spot” when players were available and willing to talk for more than just a few minutes. All of the interviews were semistructured, organized around a set of guiding topics but no strict interview schedule. Interviews lasted from about 45 minutes to several hours, sometimes across multiple occasions. Interview subjects were promised confidentiality to promote honest, forthcoming responses. Consequently, we use pseudonyms for interviewees throughout the book, and have disguised teams, places, and other persons mentioned in our research interviews.

  The interviews were supplemented by direct observation on several occasions, where we were able to watch and listen to former players interact in casual settings like autograph signings, team reunions, charity events, and informal get-togethers. Talk of retirement issues inevitably and naturally developed at these events. On some occasions, our observations were purely “noninterventional” in that we merely watched and listened without interjecting our research agenda into the ongoing in
teractions. On other occasions, however, we joined the conversations, inquiring about issues that piqued our interest. On still other occasions, we parlayed an initial conversation into relatively formal interviews. Most of the interviews were audio recorded and subsequently transcribed, although several were recorded in field notes.

  What distinguishes this study from others is its use of various techniques of “participant observation,” “auto-observation,” or “autoethnography.”2 George Koonce played football for most of his young adult life, including nine years in the NFL. After the end of his football career, Koonce earned his Ph.D. from Marquette University, where his doctoral dissertation examined role transitions of NFL players. Most of the life history interviews were conducted for this research. Perhaps more importantly, Koonce’s three and a half decades of being an “insider” in the world of elite football afforded him unparalleled opportunity to experience firsthand the issues explored in this study. The research draws heavily upon his retrospective descriptions and analysis from this insider’s perspective. Holstein and Jones also interviewed Koonce for several hours concerning his experiences as a player and, subsequently, as a retiree.

  There are advantages and disadvantages to Koonce’s unique researcher role. Any attributes of a participant observer’s role affects data collection and analysis. A primary advantage of collecting data “from the inside” has been called “intimate familiarity.”3 In his “complete membership role,”4 Koonce experienced firsthand many of the phenomena under study, so his knowledge was multidimensional: cognitive, emotional, and visceral. This, in turn, sensitized him to issues for exploration when he interviewed other players. His status as a former player—sometimes a former teammate—gave him access to interview subjects and promoted their willingness to talk openly with him. The sort of authenticity to which he had access due to his full participation in the players’ social world is often credited with contributing observational and analytic depth and understanding not available to more detached outsiders.5 At the same time, however, his insider status undoubtedly shaped interviewees’ responses, since they knew they were talking to “one of their own,” which placed their conversations within the same cultural context that they were ostensibly asked to describe.6

  In addition to formal interviews, data were also collected from the myriad interviews conducted in the sports journalism media. It’s unlikely to find lives more thoroughly questioned and examined than those of professional football players. Collectively, they are interviewed virtually every day of a seven-month-long season, and occasionally during the remaining months of the year. Between 2010 and 2013, while this study was conducted, we found hundreds of interviews with players and former players on the subject of life after football, plus even more on what it was like inside the actual players’ worlds. Add to this the dozens of biographies and autobiographies of players and former players, and we had a nearly endless supply of narrative material at our disposal.

  In all, we collected and analyzed approximately 2,500 single-spaced pages of interview data, not including narrative materials contained in the approximately 40 biographies, autobiographies, and journalistic books we consulted. We also drew upon two rigorous interview studies of former NFL players (S. Coakley 2006) and their wives (O’Toole 2006) that provided dozens of additional interviews that were pertinent to our study. All of our transcribed data were coded and analyzed using NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. Including multiple coding entries, our NVIVO data set amounted to nearly 1,000 single-spaced pages of coded data entries.

  In addition, we consulted dozens of public and organizational documents produced by the NFL, the NFLPA, the NCAA, and other organizations dealing with player welfare issues. Finally, we relied upon systematically collected data sources whenever possible, although these are rare. The Player Care study is probably the best available, but has its limitations.7

  We used an inductive “grounded theory” strategy for analyzing our data, employing a constant comparative method.8 The grounded theory approach methodically organizes unique individual experiences collected in the field (interviews, observations, documents, etc.) into comparable categories so that commonalities as well as variations in personal experiences emerge. Analysis starts with open coding, a process of line-by-line analysis of data in order to identify significant experiences and/or phenomenological themes. As patterns emerge, a more focused coding process synthesizes these patterns into hierarchically organized themes that are then systematically coded around core categories, or central themes, thus tying the data together. Data properties and dimensions are then systematically compared within and across thematic categories. The systematic comparison of data involves comparing case to case (i.e., individual to individual), case to category (i.e., individuals’ issues to emergent themes), and categories to categories (i.e., themes to themes) along their various dimensions and properties—hence the process is constantly comparative.9

  Interviews and other material gathered from internet sources pose special challenges. As a rule of thumb, we used materials only from legitimate sports and news journalism sources and web sites, and eschewed the use of personal blogs and other unauthorized sources. In addition, we considered internet data to be “legitimate” only if we found multiple references to the same (or similar) facts and themes. We did occasionally explore “deviant cases” for their comparative value, but attempted, first of all, to assure that emergent issues were not so idiosyncratic as to be unreliable or inaccurate. We have used only direct, attributed, documented quotations in our analysis.

  APPENDIX 2

  RETIREMENT BENEFITS

  Misapprehensions about player retirement benefits are rife—both among the general public and among players and former players themselves. This appendix briefly summarizes the benefits provided by the NFL, with special emphasis on limitations and qualifications for eligibility. We also note some controversial and contentious issues in this realm.

  Financial Context

  Some financial context is necessary to place retirement benefits into proper perspective. The following synopsis, taken from the NFL Player Care study, outlines the general financial picture for players who are “vested”—that is, who have spent a minimum of three to five years in the NFL, depending on the era in which they played, and are thus eligible for the benefits package.1

  Vested retirees have substantially higher incomes than men of similar ages in the general population. Younger NFL alumni report median total incomes of $85,000 (2008) and older alumni report a median of $93,400 (2008). As points of reference, the median total income for all U.S. men aged 30–49 was $55,000 and for all men 50 or older was $48,169. When NFL alumni are compared with U.S. men with some college experience (not necessarily four-year degrees), the income gaps are cut nearly in half. Still another picture emerges when we look at those at the lower end of the income ladder. Younger alumni report incomes below the poverty level at the same rate as the general population. These numbers are even more noteworthy when NFL veterans are compared with men of comparable education. NFL alumni are twice as likely to report income that is below the poverty level—8.4 percent versus 4.1 percent in the general population. Remember, these figures are based on alumni who had roughly average careers; they don’t include players with careers of three years or less.

  In terms of income sources, 49.2 percent of older alumni reported that they had annual incomes from earnings (median: $70,000), while 65.5 percent of younger players had earnings income (median: $65,000). Other sources of “labor” income include bonuses or commissions, professional practices, endorsements, and business. About a third of former players have some sort of business income. Surprisingly only around ten percent of NFL alumni make money from endorsements, and those amounts are relatively small (the median is less than $10,000). The study does not indicate how many players have no income at all, nor does it report data on players’ current total wealth.

  Benefits

  While the current NFL be
nefits package is extensive, if not comprehensive, this hasn’t always been the case. Alumni from earlier eras received only a small fraction of what’s presently available. NFLCommunications.com and other NFL sources specify the following benefits.2

  Severance Pay

  Under the severance pay plan, a released player with two or more credited seasons in the NFL receives termination pay of $12,500 per credited season. A season is “credited” if the player is on (1) the active roster, (2) the inactive list, (3) injured reserve, or (4) the physically unable to perform list for at least three regular season or postseason games. A nine-year veteran such as George Koonce, for example, would be due $112,500 upon filing for retirement.

  Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle Retirement Plan

  The retirement plan provides both pension and disability benefits. Under the latest CBA, to be eligible (i.e., vested), a player must be credited with being an active player for (1) five credited seasons if he played before 1973, or (2) four credited seasons if any of his seasons were after 1973, or (3) three credited seasons if any of them was after 1992. At the age of 55, vested players receive monthly pensions based on years in service, not based on earnings in the league. The amounts differ according to the credited seasons played. Alumni are given $250 per month for each year played before 1982, $255 per season for 1982–1992, $265 per season for 1993–1994, $315 per season for 1995–1996, $365 per season for 1997, and $470 per season for years since 1998. For example, George Koonce started his nine-year career in 1992. His monthly pension payment would be calculated as follows: (1992) $255 + (1993) $265 + (1994) $265 + (1995) $315 + (1996) $315 + (1997) $365 + (1998) ($470) + (1999) $470 + (2000) $470 = $3,190 monthly payment for life ($38,280 annually at age 55). In comparison, the occasional player such as Brett Favre, a recently retired veteran of 20 years, will pull down nearly $100,000 annually when he reaches age 55. Players may elect to receive pension checks as early as age 45, but the monthly payments are substantially reduced. If players elect to defer payments until age 65, the monthly checks are substantially larger.