Former Bust (Ryan Leaf) Has The Greatest NFL Redemption Story
Sometimes, life can seem unfair. Trials and tribulations seem to pile on some people. But if you take a step back, you can notice the intrinsic beauty of God’s design and how (if you’re open to it) the good times and the bad times always seem to work out to our benefit.
Within the football world, there's no better example of this than the story of Ryan Leaf.
You might know him as one of the biggest busts in NFL history, and while that might be true, it’s time to place him in a new category amongst the Greatest Redemption Stories in NFL History.
Calm AFTER The Storm
While he eventually became the most talked-about failed player ever, the first 22 years of his life were drastically different.
Growing up in Great Falls, Montana, from day one, Ryan Leaf was held in the highest esteem. He was so dominant athletically over all of his peers that he was basically treated like a King in Great Falls.
He admitted that due to this preferential treatment, he became a spoiled brat, not just a little entitled; it goes way beyond that.
Here’s a quote:
“I was told how great I was at something, and I tended to believe it. I thought I was a god. I was more important than you, because I could do this thing where I played a silly sport, and that made me a better human being in my eyes.”
Now last week in the Maurice Clarret video, I talked about how you should be very careful how you define yourself, as you can often set a trap that one day you’ll fall into.
Ryan made this mistake, and when the time came, the trap he set for himself took him years to climb out of. If being the best at the sport makes you more valuable as a human, what does it mean when you become known as the worst?
In Ryan’s case, all that value dissolved, and he was left with an empty shell, that he then (ironically, I guess) tried to fill with prescription pills.
Ryan was butt of all jokes for at least a decade. He was referenced on every sports show anytime they needed an example of a bust. He was referenced in movies; he was the poster child for NFL bust, and for many people, he still is.
While this is not easy by any means, once you understand the full story (up until today), you can clearly see the beauty in the design. He went from a king who thought his ability made him more valuable than others, to having that world view turned completely on its head. But it wasn’t all for nothing, not only did he learn many valuable lessons, but he later used them to get the life that he never knew he wanted, but always needed.
If not for his experience on both sides of this spectrum, he wouldn’t have turned into the man he is today.
This is Embarrassing
In the late 90s, Ryan was on top of the world. But by the early 2000s, the world was on top of him. In just a 4 year period, the former #2 overall pick had completely flamed out of the NFL.
In 1998, teams pulled their hair out trying to decide between Ryan and Peyton Manning. Most teams felt Ryan was the better prospect. The only reason Peyton really went #1 was because Ryan intentionally skipped a meeting with the Colts to force his way to San Diego. As the prospect with the “higher ceiling”, Ryan received a higher signing bonus than Peyton did, despite being drafted after Peyton.
The battle was just that close, but once in the league, the 2 QBs went down paths so different that it’s hard to believe they were ever truly rivals in the first place.
A stat I used four years ago when I first covered Ryan’s story sums up the separation quickly and emphatically.
*16 out of 17 of Peyton’s individual seasons produced more passing yards than Ryan’s entire career.
He didn’t see it at the time, but this was part of the design. The embarrassment he had loved throwing in others’ faces his whole life was now being multiplied by 1000 and turned on him. Most people blame others, play victim, and never learn the intended lesson, but later in the story, you’ll see that Ryan eventually gets it… But not before spending some time down in the depths.
These storms in our lives are part of the process, but you often can’t see it until it’s over and you’re looking out on a new horizon.
Damned If You Do
After he flamed out of the NFL, Ryan’s value system, which told him that playing football well made him better than other people, was now actively working against him. He felt worthless, and he fell into a deep depression.
He tried to fight the depression with his first addiction. The thing he’d been hooked on since childhood: Attention.
So he constantly put himself in the public eye, making appearances and getting booed mercilessly. The thing he needed so badly was now a double-edged sword. He had to experience this pain of being booed and ridiculed because that was the only way to get his fix of the attention that he craved.
It’s like being trapped on a desert island and the only food source slowly poisons you anytime you consume it.
A dark place to be man, something had to give.
So he’s trapped in this cycle where he can’t get attention without pain. He wasn’t ready to address his “need” for the attention, so he decided to address the pain instead. During his playing days, he had been introduced to opioids or painkillers. Painkillers… kill pain… it was foolproof.
Before attending the public events, he would mix the painkillers with alcohol; that way, he could numb the pain but still get the attention he craved.
Predictably, his addiction to attention led directly to his addiction to pills, as his life began to spiral further and further.
To his credit, dude was always a fighter. He was called a quitter in football, but in real life, he never gave up. Ryan tried to reach out and grab hold to something, anything, to pull himself back up, and for a time, he did.
He coached D2 football and had success. When he was coaching those kids, he felt like a new man.
After the 2-year period, he was presented with a test: Had he learned everything he needed to from the storm he’d been through?
If so, it was time for his life to move forward; But if not, he’d have to learn more lessons in the school of hard knocks.
Ryan hurt his wrist playing golf and went to the doctor. He was prescribed pain pills for his injury. Pass or fail?
Ryan failed the test miserably; he wasn’t ready yet, as he once again got hooked on the pills. Even well after his wrist had healed, he was still trying to trick the doctor into prescribing more pills.
The doctor eventually cut Ryan off, but the addiction had already taken hold of him again. Then he stooped to a new low, as the addiction caused him to betray the trust of his players who he truly cared about.
Ryan got caught stealing pain pills from the kids on his football team and replacing them with gout medication. This is an extremely serious crime.
He was placed on probation, but soon after, he was once again arrested for stealing pain pills. If you thought the first situation was extreme, the addiction took full control, and Ryan stepped it up another level.
The former 2nd overall pick started breaking into people’s houses and rummaging through medicine cabinets looking for pills. The 6’5 250 lb man had been reduced to a shadow of his former glory. Ryan was caught and sentenced to 7 years in prison for these transgressions.
From Hooked On Pills to Hooked On Phonics?
Now this selfish, attention-starved guy was sitting in a prison cell, locked away from the public. But then something that had to seem like a real annoyance to Ryan at first would transform his life once and for all.
While in jail, he was forced to teach an inmate how to read, and over time, he realized he actually enjoyed helping out.
He connected the dots and remembered the 2 years when he coached football, and how happy he had been when he focused on helping others. He helped more prisoners learn to read and spent his jail time as a teacher.
In only 2 years, he got out on good behavior, and this time, all the lessons:
From childhood to 22 as a spoiled brat
From early adulthood as a lost NFL flameout
To the deepest darkest depths of his addiction
To his time coaching kids and his time helping inmates learn to read in prison
All those lessons were now laid out, and Ryan could look and observe them. He could study them and finally interpret the picture they were painting. It all made sense why he had to see the highs and the lows. It uniquely positioned him as a unicorn in this world.
There was a time in Ryan’s life when nothing truly brought him joy. But only his greatest failures had pointed him to the thing that truly brought him fulfilment.
When he was young, it was all about how amazing he was. When he got older, it was all about how horrible he was. But he’d now discovered that when he helped others, it wasn’t about him at all, and for Ryan, he was able to find freedom in that. Here’s him describing his transformation in his own words:
“Junkie who went to prison and figured out how to be of service to another person while in prison, which gave you hope for when you walked out. And then you just started at the bottom and you made it about other people, and you found out that when you make it about other people, your life gets better. When your whole life, you believed (as a narcissist) that for your life to get better, it had to be about you. I don’t know if this works for everybody, but it works for me. When I make it about other people, my life gets better. Also, when I make it about other people, I take myself out of the equation.”
Pass or Fail? Ryans 2nd Test
During his first week out of prison, Ryan was tested. One morning, he wakes up and decides to flip through the local newspaper in his hometown of Great Falls, Montana. He sees a cartoon of himself with a headline reading:
“Lock up your medicine cabinets, Ryan Leaf’s out.”
In an instant, the pain and embarrassment from before came rushing back all at once. Ryan couldn’t cope with this feeling and began to panic. Minutes later, he was in his car, out looking for pills.
His granddad had recently had knee surgery, so Ryan headed to his house to scrounge up any pills that were left over from his recovery. But something happened that never happened before, a voice said to him,
Ryan thought about it. “In prison, I focused on helping other people.”
So he made a U-turn and headed to the homeless shelter. Once there, Ryan says he didn’t really do much. He just sat down next to the people there and let them talk. He should have given himself more credit, he didn’t realize how massive of a shift this was.
A person who had hogged all the attention for his entire life was now giving that attention to others. Those who hadn't felt seen or heard in years, if ever. Now the former “king” was at the homeless shelter with people he would have formerly considered to be peasants. The lessons had stuck and finally sunk in. Ryan Leaf was placing value on others, and it gave him an avenue away from his addiction. He passed the test!
Application
The moment Ryan had after seeing the headline in the paper is a moment that we all must go through at some point.
It’s the moment when all the bad things in your life can work out for your benefit or pull you back down and lead to your destruction.
When you’ve been prepared for this moment through the tribulations of life and the test finally comes, will you pass or fail it?
Will you bust a U-turn and go to the homeless shelter?
Or will you slip back into your old ways once again?
True Redemption
Since that time Ryan has fully embraced what he now understands to be his purpose in life.
Using his very unique set of experiences, he can relate to and help those who the world at large often pushes aside.
Think about it bro, Ryan Leaf can relate to:
College Players
Highly Drafted Players
All NFL Players
NFL Retirees searching to find new identity
NFL Busts
Guys who struggle with addiction
Guys who’ve been imprisoned
Guys shunned by society
Ect…
He’s been through it all and now fully appreciates the value in that. And he’s happy to lend his experience in the form of help to anybody who reaches out to him. He even takes it a step further by actively seeking out those guys and making himself available. He found purpose, fulfillment, and happiness in that type of work. He‘s fully dedicated himself to helping others in his own way.
He currently works with the Menninger Clinic in Houston, a state-of-the-art psychiatric substance use disorder facility. There, he works primarily with former players who are seeking out help due to addictions largely brought on by pain from football injuries.
He also works with the NFL Legends Community, a program designed to help former players navigate life after football. He helps them understand that those few years in the league do not represent their entire identity.
Even when he’s off the clock, he offers personal support to former players and in the past reached out to people like Johnny Manziel, Jamarcus Russel, and others.
He does all this on top of his work as an analyst, calling games from the booth, and his radio show/podcast.
He visits prisons, and he doesn’t just go there, talk, and then leave. He helped start a program called the Last Mile, where they strategically place educational programming into the prisons. They teach transferable skills like coding, for example, so that these guys can have hirable skills when they come home. Something that’s necessary to provide options other than the ones that got them locked up in the first place.
So even though he‘s not physically there to teach cats how to read, he’s still continuing that mission on an even larger scale.
The former narcissist, who thought everything was about him, now lives a life of service and has seen his worldview completely transform.
He now realizes that no person has more intrinsic value than another, an exact 180 to his previous beliefs.
Ryan Leaf was the biggest bust in NFL history, but now he’s the greatest redemption story in NFL history. Everything that led to his previous downfall has been turned on its head as he has completely transformed his mind, his heart, and, as a result, his life.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Ryan to show how he’s come to understand and appreciate his journey and where it’s led him to today. My hope is that we can all learn to appreciate the low points of our journeys as well.
“Sometimes, it’s crazy where someone will have heard me on a radio show or someone will have heard me on your podcast, and that will be enough to give them hope. And then I’ll get a message three years later, literally three years later, and it’ll say, “Hey, I heard you on Ty Dunne’s podcast, and I went and sought treatment, man, and I just want to tell you I’m three years sober. I’m thriving. I’m a teacher at this school.” Where would I have had that kind of influence or purpose if I had been a really good quarterback? It’s just the relatability of it is a different animal.”
“And that lifestyle has given me everything. It’s given me two children, a wonderful partner, a business, our dream home, and purposeful work with the Menninger Clinic.”
“I might be the luckiest guy on the planet to tell you the truth. Seriously. Go find someone who has it better than me. I doubt you can find that person. I really doubt you can.”