Peter King – SI.com
It’s happening to Derrick Brooks. After 11 Pro Bowls, six first-team all-pro nods, one Super Bowl victory and one Defensive Player of the Year award, football is saying to him, “We don’t need you anymore.”
He always knew it would happen, and he’s prepared himself for a career after football as well as anyone can, but it’s happening too fast, and he’s not really ready to go. He can’t believe he’s in his 17th week of unemployment after being cut by the Bucs, and no team in the NFL has offered him a chance to sign, even for relative pennies.
I’m stunned by it, quite frankly. I don’t care if the guy gets wheeled into a locker room with two broken legs. Derrick Brooks is a football player’s football player, one of the best students of the game I’ve ever seen. He keeps voluminous notes, he watches hours of tape on days off, he calls his coaches after midnight in the off-season to brainstorm. (True story. Ask the new Seattle defensive coordinator, Gus Bradley, formerly the Tampa Bay linebackers coach, about Brooks calling late one spring Saturday night with an X-and-O idea.) And to think that 31 teams in the National Football League can’t use one of 53 spots on a roster for a leader like Brooks who still has the needle on one-quarter … I don’t get it. I called around the league to find out why, and I got a bunch of he’s not the same Brooks … we’re trying to get younger … he’s not quick enough for our scheme. Blah, blah, blah. More – SportsIllustrated.com
