The NFL Has a Crisis It Won't Admit: Jordan Devey's Death Exposes a System That Chews Up Players and Spits Them Out

Jordan Devey is dead at 38 years old, and the NFL will move on without pause. There will be a moment of silence, maybe a social media post from the league office expressing condolences, and then everyone will get back to arguing about playoff seeding and draft prospects. This is how the NFL operates. It processes human tragedy like a factory processes materials, and by Monday morning, there is almost no trace that someone who dedicated his body and mind to this league has taken his own life. This is unacceptable, and it is indicative of a much larger problem that nobody in power wants to address.

Devey played seven seasons in the NFL. He was a guard, which means he was a blue-collar player doing the dirty work in the trenches for five different teams. He won a Super Bowl with the Patriots in the 2014 season. He was professional enough to stick around the league, reliable enough to get work, and talented enough to compete at the highest level of football. He was also a human being who struggled with something deeper than what any football field could heal. His family has said he died by suicide. That is the reality we are discussing. That is the conversation the NFL does not want to have.

The question that matters here is simple. What does the NFL do to take care of its players after they leave the game? The answer, based on what we know about Devey's case and countless others like it, is not enough. It is not nearly enough. The league generates $20 billion in annual revenue. It is the richest professional sports league on the planet. It has unlimited resources. Yet players from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are struggling with depression, substance abuse, traumatic brain injury complications, and financial ruin. Devey played into the 2010s, which means he should have had better resources available than predecessors. Should have. But should does not equal did.

Here is what we know about post-NFL life for most players. The transition is brutal. You spend your entire adult life in a structure. You have meetings, coaches, teammates, trainers, doctors, and a schedule that dominates every waking moment. You have a purpose. You are told what to do, where to go, and what to expect. Then it ends. One day you are an NFL player. The next day you are not. The structure vanishes. The purpose evaporates. The identity that you have built your entire life around is suddenly gone. For some players, this transition is manageable. They have family support, business opportunities, or they are able to redirect their energy into something meaningful. For others, it is catastrophic.

Depression does not care about your football resume. Having won a Super Bowl does not inoculate you against mental illness. This is a critical point that the NFL establishment seems fundamentally unable to grasp. The league operates under the assumption that if you made it to the NFL and had any success, you have the tools to handle life afterward. This is fantasy. Depression is a disease. It does not discriminate based on achievement or salary history. Devey had resources that many post-NFL players do not have. He had a Super Bowl ring and memories of playing at the highest level. He also had something else, something that no ring or memory could cure, and he was not able to overcome it.

The NFL's mental health resources are better than they were ten years ago, but they remain inadequate. The league now has a more robust mental health program. It offers resources to players. But here is the problem. These resources are primarily focused on active players. Once you are out of the league, you lose access to the NFL's infrastructure. You are cut loose. You have to navigate the mental health system as a civilian, which means you have to figure out insurance, find providers, navigate bureaucracy, and hope that what you find actually helps. For a former NFL player struggling with the specific trauma of leaving the game, this is not a good system. It is a failing system.

Devey's death is a wake-up call that nobody in the NFL wants to wake up to. The league would prefer to move past this quickly and return to business as usual. The draft is coming. Free agency is heating up. There are games to talk about and storylines to follow. A death by suicide, while sad, does not fit into the NFL's narrative. The narrative is about winning, about success, about the constant forward march of the league. The narrative does not include space for uncomfortable conversations about mental health, depression, and the ways the system fails people.

What should happen now is clear. The NFL should invest substantially in mental health resources for former players. Not small investments. Not incremental additions to existing programs. Substantial, meaningful investment. The league should establish a robust mental health support system specifically designed for post-NFL life. This should include access to therapists and psychiatrists who understand the specific challenges of leaving professional football. It should include financial support to ensure that cost is not a barrier to care. It should include community building initiatives that help former players maintain connection and purpose after football ends. It should include peer support networks where players who have successfully navigated the transition can help others do the same. This is not radical. This is basic human decency from an organization with unlimited resources.

The NFL will not do this. Not to the extent it should. The league will express sympathy for Devey's family. It will maybe allocate some additional funding to mental health initiatives. It will use his death as a talking point for a news cycle, and then it will move on. This is the pattern. We have seen it before. We will see it again. The league prioritizes its brand and its business over the well-being of the people who built it.

Devey was a guard. He was not a household name. He did not have the platform or the leverage that elite quarterbacks have. He was the kind of player the NFL uses up and discards without much thought. He showed up, did his job, moved on when he was no longer needed. That is his professional legacy. It did not have to be his life legacy. His death did not have to happen. If the systems that should exist actually existed, maybe it would have been prevented.

The verdict is this. The NFL is failing its former players in a way that costs lives. Jordan Devey's death is not a tragedy that exists in isolation. It is a symptom of a much larger problem. The league has the resources to fix this problem and chooses not to. That is not a failing of the system. That is a choice. The NFL chooses to spend its money on stadiums and marketing and executive compensation rather than comprehensive mental health support for former players. The league chooses to move forward without acknowledging the human cost of the business it operates. Until this changes, we will see more Deveys. We will see more deaths that could have been prevented. The NFL will express condolences and move on, and that will be the entire response. This is a disgrace for an organization with $20 billion in annual revenue. It is inexcusable.