It also helps players sleep after games, to unwind without pills, sleeping medication, or muscle relaxants. This is why easily 50 percent of players smoke weed. The NFL has a “reefer madness” mind-set when it comes to cannabis. They associate it with “thugs” or carelessness, but some of the greatest ideas have been sparked by marijuana. You can’t tell me Star Wars didn’t come from marijuana. And think about the iPhone. You know Steve Jobs smoked as much weed as anybody else.
SOAP OPERA FOR MEN
You’re not thinking, “Hey, man, this guy got hurt—he’s really physically hurt and he’s going to take time to recover and it’s probably going to affect his mental state and his physical state, and now he has a long, rigorous rehab.” You’re thinking, “Oh, man, he’s messing up my fantasy team.”… I think that’s why you see the frustration from a lot of players, saying they don’t care about your fantasy team. They don’t care about how it affects your fantasy team because these are real players, this is real life. This is real life.
—Richard Sherman
All my critiques of the NFL are real. But I know that people love this league, and I think above all else it’s because the NFL is a soap opera for men. Please allow me to explain.
When you hear a couple of regular-ass dudes talk about the NFL, it might start with stats or whether their team will make it to the playoffs, but before you know it, those fans have turned into a couple of old biddies gossiping about which player said what and who likes (or doesn’t like) who. I get it. I don’t mind it. In my experience, the female NFL fans are much more serious about X’s and O’s and what goes into the game than the men.
It’s a little surreal when dudes get gossipy about our league, though, because those “NFL moments” people love are not just fun and games to us. On the Seahawks, they are what helped forge our brotherhood and created the most extraordinary locker room in sports. People still want to make small talk with us in Seattle about the Super Bowls, XLVIII and XLIX, and I am more than happy to oblige. They were unforgettable experiences, but maybe not for the reasons people think.
In Super Bowl XLVIII, in 2014, we went all in against big bad Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos. Peyton had thrown for something like fifty-five touchdowns that year, and the media was in love with him. Every commercial was Peyton’s big head telling us what pizza to eat, what beer to drink, and what insurance to buy in case we got a heart attack from that nasty pizza. The Broncos were even favored by two and a half points, which is another way of saying that Las Vegas showed the world its ass for eternity, because we, of course, whooped them 43–8. It was one of the biggest behind-kickings in Super Bowl history and feels even better now, every time I see Peyton Manning playing golf with Donald Trump.
I feel like the team assembled that year was the NFL version of the 2017 Golden State Warriors: homegrown talent on cheap contracts with skills no one could match. It was unfair. The team was freak athlete after freak athlete after freak athlete. We had Kam Chancellor, Marshawn Lynch, Earl Thomas, Russell Wilson, Cliff Avril, Richard Sherman, Chris Clemons, and eventual Super Bowl MVP Malcolm Smith. But the freakiest freak—the one with a skill level so ridiculous we’d watch him in practice—was our wide receiver Percy Harvin. His physical abilities didn’t make any sense. They did not compute. It was like watching an android come to our practices.
But it wasn’t just the stars. We came at you in waves. Our backup cornerbacks eventually became $60 million or $70 million corners on other teams. Our backup linebacker was named the game’s MVP and eventually signed to a $30 million free-agent deal. Our defensive line was stacked with monsters. Cliff Avril and I—both future Pro Bowlers—didn’t even start. We had so many great players it felt unfair.
A lot of us thought it was hilarious that Vegas and many of the experts were favoring Denver going into the game. We knew we would win, and honestly, it wasn’t just self-confidence. We knew we would win because their quarterback was Peyton Manning. We looked at tape and were like, “Shit! He can’t throw deep anymore! That arm is a rubber chicken!” With our corners, we knew: if Peyton couldn’t throw deep, it was not going to work because we could cheat up on his receivers, and our defensive front seven were too fast to get taken on Peyton’s dinky screens and short crossing patterns. He set a Super Bowl record for completions that day, and the Broncos still almost got shut out. That says it all. We tackled them every single time. Without a garbage touchdown at the end, it would have been a shut-out—the first of any Super Bowl.
That game changed NFL history because the Broncos’ president, John Elway, looked at our team and decided to build his just like ours: a defensive-dominant team anchored by big cornerbacks and pass rushers everywhere. They won a Super Bowl two years later, with Peyton and Brock Osweiler under center. Elway even tried to sign me as a free agent after our Super Bowl win, but I was happy right where I was.
The next year, we were going for back-to-back Super Bowl titles and
