The NFL's Jordan Devey Problem: We Build Them Up and Throw Them Away

Jordan Devey is dead at 38 years old, and the NFL wants to offer its thoughts and prayers while changing nothing. This is the uncomfortable truth that nobody in professional football wants to discuss. A man who made millions playing a violent game for seven seasons, who won a Super Bowl ring with the New England Patriots, who was supposed to have made it, is gone by his own hand. The league will tweet condolences. Teams will issue statements about mental health resources. And then on Sunday, the machine keeps rolling, indifferent to the body parts it has already discarded.

I am not here to psychoanalyze Jordan Devey's personal struggles. That is not my job, and frankly, it would be disrespectful to his family to pretend I know what was happening in his mind or his life in those final days. What I am here to do is ask the hard question that the NFL refuses to answer: How many more players have to die before this league acknowledges that it is fundamentally broken in how it treats human beings? Not just stars. Not just first-round picks. But guys like Jordan Devey, the reliable guard who did his job, who played hurt, who showed up every Sunday and got beaten up for a living.

Let's talk about who Jordan Devey actually was. He was a guard who played for the Patriots, the Seahawks, the Ravens, the Colts, and the Texans across his career. He was a Super Bowl champion. He was a professional athlete at the highest level. He was also a man who, like thousands of other former players, had to figure out what happens when the roar of the crowd stops. When the paychecks stop. When the identity that was built over decades, the thing that defined your entire existence since you were a kid, simply evaporates. The NFL does not prepare players for this transition. The league does not care about this transition. The NFL cares about winning games and generating revenue. Everything else is a problem to be managed, not solved.

Here is what I know about professional football. It is a sport that demands everything from you. It demands your body. It demands your youth. It demands your health, both mental and physical. You sign up knowing that you might get a concussion. You might blow out a knee. You might suffer a career-ending injury that vanishes your future in a single play. But what they do not tell you, what the league does not broadcast in those shiny highlight reels, is what happens when you are done. What happens when your body is broken, your mind is haunted, and nobody needs you anymore. The teams move on. The fans move on. The media moves on. You are left holding the bag of whatever damaged goods you have become.

The statistics are damning, and yet the NFL barely acknowledges them. Former players suffer from depression at rates far higher than the general population. They struggle with substance abuse. They struggle with financial ruin because they made poor decisions or got fleeced by people they trusted. They struggle with their identities because they were taught from childhood that their value as a human being was directly tied to their ability to block, tackle, throw, and catch. When that ability is gone, so is their identity. The league knew this. Researchers have been telling the NFL about this for years. The league has ignored it because acknowledging the problem would require changing the system, and the system makes too much money.

Jordan Devey was not a Hall of Famer. He was not a first-round pick who got tens of millions of dollars guaranteed. He was a journeyman guard who worked for seven teams in seven years. He was the kind of player who gets cut without fanfare, who moves on to the next job, who is quickly forgotten. And that is precisely the problem. The NFL has built a system where guys like Jordan Devey are disposable. They are interchangeable parts in a machine. They play out their contracts, get released, and then have to figure out what comes next. Some of them do fine. They find new careers, rebuild their lives, adapt to being regular people. Some of them do not. Some of them become statistics. Some of them become suicides.

The league has established player assistance programs. These programs exist to create the appearance that the NFL cares about mental health while doing the bare minimum to actually address the problem. A player can call a hotline. A player can get counseling. But these programs are voluntary, and they are underfunded, and they are not built into the fabric of the league in any meaningful way. There is no requirement that teams employ mental health professionals. There is no mandate that players receive counseling before they retire. There is no system in place to catch guys who are falling through the cracks. The NFL would rather spend money on marketing its commitment to player safety than actually implementing systemic changes.

What bothers me most is the hypocrisy. The NFL generates 100 billion dollars a year. This is an industry that is worth more than most nations. It has the resources to build a comprehensive mental health infrastructure that would catch every former player who is struggling. It could hire therapists, social workers, financial advisors, and life coaches to help players transition out of the league. It could mandate that every player receive mental health screening and counseling. It could build a safety net that actually protects its workers. Instead, it offers empty platitudes and insufficient resources. The league prioritizes player health when it affects the bottom line, like with concussions and CTE. It ignores mental health because mental health does not show up on the field. Mental health cannot be fixed with better equipment. Mental health requires the league to admit that its system is damaging, and the NFL will never do that.

Jordan Devey's death is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a much larger disease in professional football. The disease is called greed, combined with indifference to human suffering. The disease is called building players up as warriors and then abandoning them when they can no longer compete. The disease is called a system that extracts everything from a man and then discards him without a second thought. This disease has killed before, and it will kill again, because the NFL has no incentive to change.

I have covered this sport for years. I have watched teams win championships and lose them. I have watched coaches rise and fall. I have watched owners make billions while players sacrifice their bodies and their minds. And I have watched the league ignore its own complicity in the damage it causes. The NFL wants to talk about diversity. It wants to talk about social justice. It wants to appear progressive and caring. But it will not meaningfully address the mental health crisis among its former players because that would require accountability and change.

The verdict is simple. The NFL failed Jordan Devey. It failed him the moment it drafted him, because it built him into a machine without teaching him how to be a human being when the machine shut down. It failed him every time it cut him loose without checking in on his wellbeing. It failed him by creating a system where a seven-year veteran could fall through the cracks completely unnoticed. Most of all, the NFL failed him by knowing about this problem for decades and choosing to do nothing about it because the cost of doing nothing is cheaper than the cost of change.

His family deserves answers. The other players in this league deserve better. And the NFL deserves to answer for its negligence, though I know it never will.