The conversation almost ended before it started with the line I said at the top: nobody in the NFL ever starts the season at 100%.
I meant it as a setup. What I actually meant — what I've been thinking about for thirteen years — is that availability isn't a gift. It's a product. It's manufactured in the months nobody sees, in the training sessions that happen when the cameras are off and the coaches have gone home and the only person still in the weight room is you and whoever you've paid to make sure you're doing it right.
I played thirteen seasons in the NFL and never missed a game because of injury. When people hear that, they want to give it to genetics. They want to give it to luck. I understand the impulse — it's a cleaner story, and it lets everyone off the hook. But I've had surgeries. I've played on a torn ACL. I've had the kind of weeks where I didn't know how I was going to line up on Sunday and then I lined up on Sunday. None of that is luck. That's a system, built deliberately, over time, by people who knew what they were doing — and a young guy who eventually got smart enough to listen to them.
The episode this week is really about one thing, even though we talked around it from a dozen different angles: the players who last the longest aren't just more talented or more fortunate. They've built an infrastructure — nutritionists, performance directors, sleep protocols, training philosophy — that the average player either doesn't know exists or doesn't think applies to them yet. And by the time they think it applies to them, they're already in year seven running on fumes and wondering why their body is betraying them.
The number nobody tracks
Everybody in the league talks about production. Everybody talks about contract value, draft slot, PFF grade, snap count. The number nobody talks about seriously is availability — not as a raw count but as a compounding asset.
Here's what I mean. When I show up in December at 85%, and the guy across from me is at 65%, I've already won before the snap. That delta — 20 percentage points — is the dividend on everything I did in June and July while the other guy was relaxing. The work in the off-season doesn't just prepare you for week one. It pays out in week seventeen and beyond, when the season has beaten everyone else down and I'm still close to functional.
Most players understand this conceptually. Almost none act on it structurally. They train hard in the off-season — everyone trains hard — but they don't build the system around the training that makes the training compound. The nutrition. The sleep architecture. The in-season lifting philosophy. The detailed weekly programming that accounts for Thursday games and Thanksgiving short weeks and first-round byes. That's not training. That's infrastructure. And infrastructure is what separates the player who makes it thirteen years from the one who's done at seven.
What I actually changed — and when
The honest version of my nutrition story is that I had no idea what I was doing early on. Year one, maybe year two, my uncle pushed me: man, you need to get a chef. So I got a chef. That was the first step — not because I had some profound understanding of performance nutrition, but because someone I trusted told me to, and I was smart enough not to argue.
From there it was years of iteration. Blood work. Food intolerance tests. Trying pescatarian, trying keto, trying every protocol that had a name and a following. I don't eat a lot of red meat because I just don't process it well — except lamb, which I actually do fine with, which is its own thing. The point isn't the specific protocol. The point is that I treated my body like a system I could actually understand if I paid enough attention to it. I didn't outsource that understanding to someone else. I built it myself, with help, over time.
The thing about the intolerance tests — and I want to say this clearly because people misuse them — is that they're a snapshot, not a verdict. If you tested intolerant to avocados, it's probably because you ate avocados yesterday and they're still in your system. You don't never eat avocados again. You use the data as one input, not the whole answer. The test tells you where to look. It doesn't tell you what to do.
Sugar is the one I'd go back and address earlier. I remember specific games where I had a cheat day the week before and I could feel it in my bones on Sunday. Not metaphorically. Literally. The recovery from what I was calling 50, 100 car crashes per game — that's what a football play is, by the way, that's the impact toll — is genuinely compromised when you're running on garbage fuel. I knew this intellectually by year four or five. I didn't fully act on it until later. That's years of suboptimal recovery I left on the table.
Sleep was the thing I underestimated most
Year one, I was in the streets. That's just the truth. Young, first money, first freedom — sleep was an afterthought. My body could absorb it then.
By the middle of my career I was in bed by 8:00, 8:30. Lights out at 9:00. Up at 5:00 or 6:00. Every week, basically without exception. My wife will tell you — she hates it, still, even now that I'm retired. "You never wanna stay out late. You never wanna go to a night game." And I look at her like: that game's at 8:30. I'm not going to that game. We can do the 6:30 game.
The habits never fully went away because I genuinely felt the difference. Not in some abstract "I feel better" way — in the way that when you've optimized something hard for a decade, you can feel immediately when it slips. I went to London once and started adjusting my body clock on Thursday — four days early — wearing blue light glasses at specific hours, getting up at 3:00 AM to shift the circadian rhythm to London time before we flew. That's not obsessive. That's just understanding that sleep isn't passive recovery. It's the thing all the other recovery runs through. Get the sleep wrong and the nutrition means less, the training means less, the treatment means less. Everything downstream of sleep suffers.
The players who burned through their careers in eight or nine years — I've watched enough of them to have a theory. Almost none of them had broken sleep as the only problem. But almost all of them had broken sleep as one of them, and then the other things compounded on top of a foundation that was already compromised.
PULL QUOTE: "Nobody in the NFL ever starts the season at 100%. It's a mindset. If I see you at the end of the season, I'm gonna be at 85% and you gonna be at 65%." — Ndamukong Suh
The Olympic lift problem, and the thing I unlearned
Here's one that's going to make some old-school coaches uncomfortable: I couldn't tell you the last time I had a barbell on my back before my Nebraska freshman year. That's not an exaggeration. I stopped doing traditional back squats decades ago.
The reason isn't ideology — it's function. On a football field, I am never in a controlled bilateral squat position under a balanced load. I am on one leg, pushing against an offensive lineman, with another dude trying to cut me from the side, at an angle nobody planned. So what does a bilateral barbell squat prepare me for, exactly? The movement pattern doesn't exist in the game.
What does exist: single-leg squats, angled squats, rows, kettlebell work in compromised positions, anything that forces me to stabilize and produce force the way I actually produce force. The training has to reflect the demand. When it doesn't, you're not just missing opportunity — you're potentially building movement patterns and tissue stress that don't match what Sunday is going to ask of you.
The caveat I'd add: this is position-specific. A quarterback can lift heavy, but with real constraints on shoulder and arm exposure. A defensive lineman has different constraints than a wide receiver. The framework isn't "never do Olympic lifts" — the framework is does this movement match what I actually have to do? If it doesn't, you're training a body you don't need for a game you're playing.
What I'd actually tell a player who wants thirteen years
Three things, in order, that I think are actually actionable — not vague inspiration, actual structure:
- Build the team before you think you need it. I was lucky that my uncle pushed me toward a chef in year one or two. A lot of players wait until something breaks before they invest in the infrastructure to prevent breaking. By then you've already lost two or three years of compounding. The performance director, the nutritionist, the sleep specialist, the physical therapist — these aren't luxuries for when you've made it. They're the reason you make it long enough for the second contract to matter. Derrick Henry. LeBron. The guys spending seven figures on their bodies aren't doing it because they're already healthy. They're doing it because that investment is what keeps them healthy. The question isn't whether you can afford the team. It's whether you can afford not having it.
- Train heavy in season. Don't coast into your bye week. This is the one that separates the players I respect most from the ones who were good for four years and then faded. In season is maintenance — I've heard that my whole career, and it's half right. The maintenance target is what you built in the off-season, not some lower baseline you drift toward. A bye week is not a vacation. It's an opportunity to put strength back on, challenge your body when the game-week schedule isn't compressing your recovery window. The players who treat it as a vacation show up to the second half of the season smaller, slower, and more injury-prone than they started. The ones who keep pushing show up to January looking like they're ready for January.
- Know the difference between injured and hurt. Hurt is the cost of admission. Every single player in the league is hurt, at some level, from about week four onward. Playing hurt is not heroism — it's the baseline expectation of the job. Injured is different. Injured means the structure is compromised in a way that playing through it makes the eventual repair longer and harder. I've played on a torn ACL. I've pushed through things most people would have sat out. But I also did that with a team around me who could tell me the difference — who could look at what I was dealing with and say this is manageable or this puts the next three years at risk. Flying blind on that call, without expertise around you, is where careers end early. Not in a single dramatic moment. In a series of reasonable-seeming decisions made without enough information.
The 13-year streak gets treated as a fact about me. I want it understood as a fact about a system — the people around me, the protocols we built, the philosophy we tested and refined and applied week after week for over a decade.
I was blessed. I'll always say that. But blessed got me to the door. The work built everything on the other side of it.