It’s rarely easy for an NFL coach to cut a player from their pre-season roster. Getting from the 90 that start preseason to a 53-man opening day roster is tough for a long list of reasons, but no more so than you have to tell 37 people that they won’t get to play for the team. Which in many cases means you’re telling them their dream of playing in the NFL is over. For some, that means way more than losing a job and admittedly lucrative paycheck. It might be the end of years of singular focus and perhaps their own self-identity. The end of living a professional life as part of surrogate family with shared sacrifice and collective action. Getting cut from a sports team is often a lot different than getting fired from other jobs because there’s not another NFL team down the street.
No one had a tougher cut day than Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson, who yesterday had to inform his son Josh that he would not play tight end for the Jags this season. This didn’t likely come as a huge surprise for Josh, who was pretty far down the depth chart and has never played in a regular season NFL game but did have some success in the USFL. But it still must have hurt, perhaps more for dad than son – and I say this as a parent, not a football player. Josh will get to stay on the practice roster this year, which means he’ll still be around the game and earn a far less impressive paycheck. But his dream of being part of the traveling circus of the NFL is one year less likely, a message his father had to deliver himself.
Of course, you don’t have to go to the NFL to find stories of angst and disappointment as sporting careers come to an unceremonious end, not by choice but by mandate. We’re in the pre-season period for fall high school sports, the time of team tryouts and roster selections and hours of practice before classes start. And as exciting it is for a lot of kids, it’s also the time when a whole bunch are told that their time playing the game they love and being a part of a peer group they crave is over – and usually just like that. It happens with letters and emails and teary-eyed conversation and rosters posted on a wall. It happens to freshmen and sophomores and even juniors, when limited varsity roster spots make it impossible to carry an upperclassman another year on JV. Which means that instead of looking ahead to hours after school on fields and bus rides across town each week, a bag full of gear gets thrown on the floor in the garage, one filled with cleats and pads and shirts and now might never get opened again. And instead of being at school until five every day and getting exercise and being with your friends it’s walking home at 2:30 to start your homework. And the sport that you played since you were five, on rec teams and maybe travel squads and summer camps, it’s over. Not by choice, but by mandate. That’s the reality for a lot of American kids whose involvement with sports ends at 14 or 15 with excruciating disappointment. And we wonder why American adults are so unhealthy.
For the record, this is not a critique of the school coaches who have make these calls, most of whom care deeply about their kids and get sick to their stomachs every time they have to end someone’s nascent career. They do what they have to do – which is field a competitive team that conforms to roster size and budget constraint. And they end up in the gut-wrenching position of having to deliver a message on what might be the worst day of some kids life so far.
I don’t have a real answer – well, I’d love to see more inclusive youth and high school sports, even as someone who is a byproduct of a system that wasn’t. I’d love to figure out a way that anyone who wanted play still could, even though I have no idea how that gets funded. Maybe it’s just now as an adult I’m realizing the inevitable pain that comes with growing up, something that feels much worst as a parent than it did as a kid.
In the end, it’s tough getting cut, and maybe worse making the cuts. Just ask Doug Pederson.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
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