I’m about to run off to a little party, but I was reading a bit this morning and was really impressed by Peter King’s “Monday Morning Cornerback.” It’s one of my weekly reads during the season, so it’s no surprise that I enjoyed it; the surprise was that most of the first half of the article was written by Ross Tucker about what is likely the anticlimactic endingof his career.

Although all but a few of the cut players attended college, I’m sure more than half have no idea what they’re going to do now. Most of these young men are facing failure and rejection for the first time. Getting cut from a team or being anything less than the star has never even been a consideration for them until this point.
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I consider myself very fortunate in the sense that I have been preparing for this moment from the time my career started. When I first made the Redskins as an undrafted rookie in 2001, I realized that might be my only year, so I invested the money, continued driving my 1990 Jeep Cherokee, and began thinking about what I would want to do when football was over. I was keenly aware that football was just a temp job. I have a couple of business interests, such as http://www.gobigrecruiting.com, that will occupy my time, and I am more than excited about the possibility of writing or talking about football for a living. I figure if I can’t play anymore, that would be the next best thing.

But it is not the same as playing. Nothing else in life can replicate the feeling of running into another man in front of 90,000 people and hitting him as hard as you possibly can. My mom will probably hate reading this, but more than the paycheck or the camaraderie of the locker room, I will really miss the violence. It is just an amazing and pure primal feeling that you really don’t understand if you have never had the chance to do it.

If you’re a fan of football, you’ll enjoy this look at one of the game’s smaller names. Honestly, he played longer than most players do, he sounds like he was smart with his money, an, as a Princeton grad, he’ll do just fine in the future. How many of these players--especially those who didn’t end up with useful degrees, who didn’t really notice academics--are set up quite so well?

Not that I feel terribly sorry for them. The decisions that they made, good and bad, are theirs and their salaries, even over a short career, dwarf what I make for a living. I do think that a good number of them would do well to have mentors like Tucker to help them make good decisions in their personal lives and money management.

Come to think of it, I could take a few lessons in those departments, too.

Read the rest.