Nate Jackson

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I left that room knowing I was probably in trouble,
and I was. It was like, you know. A month later,
three weeks later, whatever, I had been cleared and I
was back home visiting my parents and I got a
call from my agent. He told me, have you talked
to the broncos. I'm like, no, nobody's called me, and
he said, well, you might want to call him. I
think they're letting you go. I wanted an explanation from him,
so I called and his secretary answered the phonies. I said, hey,

(00:23):
it's Nate Jackson. Can I talk to Josh? And he's like, yeah,
hold on just a second, puts me on hold. Twenty
seconds later, comes back. He says, Josh is in a
meeting and he'll call you back, and I said, okay, cool.
Never called back.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome to Cut Traded Fired Retired, a weekly podcast featuring
conversations with professional athletes and coaches in a variety of sports.
I started this podcast for a lot of reasons, including
being able to preserve stories, learn from experiences, and find
strategies and motivation. I'm your host, Susie Wargen. Nate Jackson
didn't spend his youth playing pee weee football. Instead, he

(00:59):
became one with the black line at the bottom of
a swimming pool. He became very proficient at a variety
of strokes and distances, but when Nate's parents finally allowed
him to play football in high school, he was all in.
Nate learned the game and was good, but not good
enough for a scholarship. He started college, where he was
told he could walk on after his freshman year, but
that didn't pan out, so he transferred to Division three

(01:22):
Menlo College, where he thrived and set records. In Nate's
senior season, he was the NCAA Division three Offensive Player
of the Year and eventually he went into Menlo's Athletics
Hall of Fame. Going D three to the NFL is
not easy, even with a connection like Bill Walsh, who
would watch Nate play in college because Bill's son was
the athletic director at Menlo. As an undrafted free agent,

(01:45):
Nate started with the forty nine ers. He got hurt,
was cut, rehabbed, and re signed. Then San Francisco traded
him to the Broncos, where he stayed until the infamous
Josh McDaniels came in and cleared house. Eventually, some nagging
injuries a stop to Nate's career, although he did keep
trying for a bit. Since retiring, Nate's written a book

(02:05):
countless articles, been a radio talk show host, and currently
works with Gorilla Sports, and is the NFL's uniform inspector
on the Broncos sidelines. He's got some great stories, ladies
and gentlemen. Nate Jackson cut Traded Fired Retired podcast with
Susie Wargin. Hello, Nate Jackson. How you doing.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
I'm great? How are you?

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I'm doing well? Thank you. It's good to have you
in here. We've talked about this a few times, and
I know you got the new baby, so thank you
for taking some time. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
She's adorable. Three weeks old. She's already changed my life.
She's already melted my heart. I have a son and
he's awesome. Yeah, this is something different. Oh yeah, baby girl.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Now little girls and their daddies. There's just something else
with that.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
I know.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, good, well, thank you to your
wife too, who is letting you have some time. I
appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
She's probably having to give me out of the house.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
To be like, you need to go for an hour.
Get out. Yeah bye, yeah, go talk to somebody else.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, I'm sicking your voice, right.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Okay, so you've got a great story, love. We were
just saying, you've hit every single thing in the podcast title. Yeah, traded, fired,
and retired.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
No, and you're still going. You're doing some really cool
stuff these days. So let's go back to your beginnings.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Though.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
You're born in San Jose. That's right, Pioneer High School.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Wow, we know all about it.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Oh, I've done I do my research, Nate.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, yeah, I like that.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
What did you do growing up sports wise? Did you
have an affinity for football or was there another sport
you thought, yep, that's my sport.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
I loved football, but my parents wouldn't let me play
it until I got to high school. So my first
love was actually swimming. I was a competitive swimmer, and
that was what I lived for. I started swimming competitively
at the age of five, and I swam competitively until
eighteen years old.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
I swam year round from the ages of seven until fourteen.
When I got to high school, I wanted to play football.
I still wanted to play football, and I wanted to
play other sports. And when you're a swimmer, like a
really dedicated swimmer, you have to swim double days every
day all year long. That's the only sport you can do.
And so when I got to high school, I was
done with it. But for a handful of years, swimming
was what I really dreamed about.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
I mean, my particular stroke or a particular event.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
So as a kid, you swim pretty much everything. But
I was a particularly fast butterflyer and freestyler. Oh damn.
Backstroke never really my thing. Breastroke ended up being something
I tried in high school for a little while. But
in high school, after I hit puberty and I was
as big as I was going to get. In high school,
I was a sprinter. I was a fifty freestyle hunter, freestyler.
I loved it. I loved the racing aspect of it.
Just standing on the blocks and there's nothing in front

(04:32):
of you. It's an empty lane, and there's someone next
to you on either side and you gotta beat them.
And that's when I learned my competitive edge, really to
trust myself in the moment in competition, because you got
no one else to rely on. You're up there on
your own on the blocks, but ultimately I wanted to
be on a team. I wanted to be playing ball sports.
I played soccer as well, and I love being on
a team and making plays because you can't really make

(04:52):
a play in swimming, and swim practice tends to be
pretty boring. It just back and forth and back.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Gets boring, doesn't it.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
It does. A funny story about the black line. When
I was a kid, probably around five years old, first
learning to swim, we had a cabana club down the
street from my house in San Jose and we'd spend
summers there and I lived there. It was great. But
one of the older kids told me that the black
line on the bottom of the pool smells like licorice. Stop.
And of course I went down and tried to take
a whiff, and it does well, not so good, get

(05:23):
a brain full of chlorine water. But it's a good
lesson to learn, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
And did you try that on anybody else?

Speaker 1 (05:29):
It's one of those things once you get once you
have that trick up your sleeve, you pass it down.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Oh yeah, oh my gosh, that's hilarious.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah wow.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Okay, So football starts in high school. Do you start
out just playing offense? And wide receiver. Do you go
through a few positions.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
I start off as a running back. I had not
hit puberty yet. I was five seven, one hundred and
thirty pounds.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Oh whoa, yeah, okay, a little different than what you
are now.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Quite different. Get out there and you know, I'm playing
against kids who had hit puberty and had been playing
for five or six years on Pop Warner and things
like that, so it was quite a wake up call.
Prior to that, I was playing out in the street
with my friends two hand Touch Joe Montana and Jerry Rice,
lamp post to lamp posts as the street lights faded,
or at the park. You know, we'd play tackle. But

(06:12):
there's nothing like putting on a helmet, putting on shoulder pads,
biting down on a mouthpiece and then really hitting for
the first time or getting hit. It's shocking because of
the different elements involved. It's not flesh and bone. It's
hard plastic and metal cracking against your flesh and bone.
And it's pain, is what it is. And I already
sort of liked pain a little bit. I was always

(06:32):
a rough kid and had a lot of stitches all
the time, things like that, so it was a natural
sort of evolution for me. But it was hard at
first to deal with these new elements of it, and
just the technique of football players to get low, to
get your head up to don't understand how to hit,
how to absorb a hit, how to block, how to tackle.
Those things are not intuitive.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
No, And if you've never played it before until high school,
you don't have that ingrained in you from peewee.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
No. And so I was running back freshman. I played
a lot of scout team and I just got my
butt kicked every day. But it was a good learning experience.
And then sophomore year, I decided I wanted to be
a quarterback, so I went out for quarterback. The thing
was my buddy, who was a starting quarterback. I was
backing him up.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
You know.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
I had a good arm, and I played okay when
I had the chance, but I wasn't playing. I was
riding the bench. So at the very last game of
sophomore year, I made the switch to wide receiver and
I caught a couple of passes and I just fell
in love with that, just making the catch in the game,
and I developed a connection with that buddy. The receiver
to quarterback connection, which is sacred. And so we ended
up playing together the next couple of years and had

(07:33):
a great high school career. I guess you can't call
it a career.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
High career absolutely is it? Yeah? Yeah, experience experience.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
But we played in a high school that had we
ran the wing T offense, which is not receiver friendly.
One receiver on the field, three running backs, one tight end,
and we handed the ball off a lot of misdirection,
veer stuff, and you know, I just didn't get a
lot of action. I didn't get recruited at all. I
didn't get any scholarship offers. It was nothing. So I
walked on at cal Pauly San Luis Obispo, their coach

(08:03):
at the time. I'd send him my tape. He said,
I like you, Nate, but I can't offer you anything,
but I would love for you to come walk on here.
I got accepted to University of Oregon, obviously wasn't going
to play there. I got accepted to UC Santa Barbara.
They didn't have a football team, so I was deciding
between those three schools. So I chose cal Pauly, thinking
I was going to walk on and make the team.
You know, I ended up becoming a student there. I

(08:24):
went out for a student orientation and that week the
coach that I had talked to left. He went to
the NFL to be a position coach. Oh, his name's
Andrea Patterson. Yeah, And they had hired another guy, Larry Welsh,
who was a local kind of central California high school
legend coach who was going to coach this college team.
And it was during spring practice, and I went out

(08:44):
there and introduced myself to him. I was with my dad,
and he told me, you know, we got all our
spots filled here this year. Why don't you just come
to school here your freshman year and try out at
the end of your freshman year. This was after I
had decided to go to the school and walk on. Wow,
what am I going to say? Okay, coach? So my
dad and I left, and a couple months later I

(09:04):
come back there to go to school just as a student,
not playing football, not understanding why I didn't get the chance,
but trusting that the coach is going to give me
a fair shot in the spring. Winter ball comes around, whatever,
I start running and lifting with the team, and then
spring ball comes around and all of us walk ons
are pushed into the corner, don't really get a fair shot.
And spring game comes around. I got moved to tight
end with a week left in spring practice. I had

(09:26):
never played tight end before. Didn't make the team. I
wasn't even informed that I didn't make the team. The
head coach is like, we'll let you guys know. All
you walk ons, we'll let you know in the next
couple days. Well, two or three days go by, and
none of us heard anything. So I walked into his
office and he barely looked up from his stack of papers,
and he's like, oh, yeah, you Like, what do you want?
And I'm like, well, I just want to know if
I made the team. Coach He's like, nah, you didn't

(09:47):
make it. Too slow to play receiver, too small to
play tight end, good luck, And he kind of looked
back down at his paper.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Oh my gosh, Nace, you did a whole year of school.
They're thinking that you were going to be able to
go there and play in the spring and get on
with the football team.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yep, and so wow. I walk out of his office thinking,
you know, my football dreams are dead. That was at
the end of my freshman year. I went back there
in my sophomore year just as a student. But I
was in a fraternity at this point. So I was
playing fraternity sports and I was kicking ass right as
you should. Yeah, I mean these frat boys, I was dominating. Yeah,

(10:21):
And I'm like, you know what, I got to keep
playing this sport. And so started talking to my high
school high school coach about what I should do, and
he mentioned a little tiny school called Menlo College in
the Bay Area, which is right down the street from Stanford.
You could pass it on the road. You wouldn't even
see it. Five hundred students, that's it.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Oh. At that time it was Division III, right.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yes it was, but it had quite an NFL pedigree,
a stable of former NFL players as their coaches. Ken
Margham was the head coach there at the time who
played at Stanford and with the Bears the eighty five Bears.
Doug Cosby was the offensive coordinator who was a legendary
tight end with a Cowboys. Guy McIntyre was our offensive
line co Tom Rathman was there as a running backs coach.

(11:02):
Keith Millard was a defensive coordinator. There was all these
former NFL players that had descended on Menlo College in
the Bay Area because it just it allowed them to
be close to, you know, the Bay Area was kind
of a hub for the sort of coaching path and
just the intellectual approach to football. With Bill Walsh, it
was really Bill Walsher's brainchild.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
And Bill Walsh's son was the athletic director, correct he was,
so that was helpful to probably get some of those
guys in there.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Right exactly, Tree exactly.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
And so that was the roots.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yes, And so I started talking to a coach there
by the name of Fred Judici, and he he really
sold me on it, and I went out there and
visited and I just kind of felt at home there,
and I decided to make the switch. And it was
really like a dream. It was like, you know, I'm
leaving this school where I have a lot of friends.
I'm in a fraternity, there's a lot of parties. It's fun,

(11:50):
you know, but I lacked the purpose that football gave me.
And so when I got to Menlo and I found
this thing I cared about. It just everything fell into
place and I had three years there, first team All
American two years in a row, and led the nation.
And Bill Walsh used to come to our games, Oh
my god, and stand right there in the end zone
and I would catch a touchdown and fall at Bill
Walsh's feet. Wow, he's my hero. I grew up a

(12:11):
forty nine er fan. Yes, you know. And so when
we all knew when Bill was at the game because
he would stand right there by the end zone, his
unmistakable white hair, his omniscient football gaze, the way he
just stood there seeing everything. And so after one of
these games, had a really good game, my coach Doug
Cosby's said, Hey, Bill wants to talk to you. So
I dropped my helmet, ran over to Bill and introduced himself,

(12:34):
like I didn't know who he was. But I don't
remember what I said. I just remember he said, look,
you just keep doing what you're doing. You're gonna get
your chance at the next level. You can do this.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Great game of mentions the next level.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, he did. And there was a USA Today reporter
there at that game. That reporter talked to Bill for
the story that they were doing about me because I
was leading the country and receptions and all that stuff,
and he said some really nice things to that reporter
about me. The article came out, Bill said, what he said,
and then now scouts wanted to come and talk to me. Wow,
and so it kind of started, you know, rolling at

(13:06):
that point.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah. Well, in your senior year you were the offensive
player of the Year for Division III football in NCAA
and then you go into their Hall of Fame in
two thousand and nine too, So obviously you did some
great things there. So did you leave cal Paly in
your sophomore.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
Year at the end of myself at the end, So
you did.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Two years there, then you had three more years.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
And there was a point in which I thought about
after my first year at Menlo, because I had a
pretty good first year. Ken Martorham, who was the head coach,
left for cal Berkeley to be the receiver coach there,
and I was going to maybe go with him, but
I would have had to sit out a year, and
that would have given me only one more year pre nil.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Everybody transfers days.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
Right, But there was a question as to whether or
not I was going to be able to get the exposure
at Menlo to be able to get to the next level.
I'm glad I stayed because you know, I had back
to back one hundred plus catch seasons fifteen hundred yards like,
I got the action that's needed to show people that
you can catch the football. And when the football is
in flight, it's a football. It doesn't matter what division

(14:06):
it is. Now, of course you're the guy's covering, you
get better. But when the ball's in the air, the
ball's in.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
The air and you can catch it or you.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Don't, right, And that's something I learned when I got
signed to the forty nine ers in my first mini camp,
I wasn't scared, but I was anxious to see what
this was going to be. Like. You know, I had
been playing against D three competition.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
And that's two thousand and two. You go undrafted and
then you're able to get on with the forty nine
ers thanks in part two Bills again.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
I mean yeah. Bill Walsh was a consultant with the
forty nine ers at the time. He also helped get
me on the East West Shrine Game roster, which was
a college all star game, and no other D three
players were playing in that, but I was able to play.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
You got to play in that.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
Well, No, I heard my hamstring in that week. I
pulled my hamstring on the second day of practice.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
It was it was horrible no.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
So I actually missed that game and I thought, there
goes my chance. But sure enough there was Bill there
to talk me down off the ledge, saying, look, just
get your hamstring ready, you'll get into a camp, you'll
be fine. And he was right, and he's the one
who helped me get into the camp. So I got
into camp with the forty nine ers, and the very
first day of mini camp practice there I go. I
lined up against Ahmed Plumber, who was their starting corner

(15:13):
at the time, and I beat him. I beat him deep,
caught the ball, Yay, touchdown, and I'm like, okay, yes
he's a human being. Yes, my skills translate. The whole
knock against me was always that I wasn't fast enough
to play wide receiver, and I internalized that. I you know,
it was an insecurity of mine. But at that moment
I realized, yeah, you're fine. You just beat this guy.

(15:33):
He's a starter in the NFL. So there's these incremental moments.
People talk about what's your most triumphant moment in football. Well,
to me, it wasn't one. It was just these steps.
You know, this moment where you realize you belong you
make a play here. It leads to the next one.
It leads to the next one. So that was an important.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Moment, huge, absolutely, And you need that confidence in training
camp because there's so little times where, especially as an
undrafted college free agent, where you get those moments of
confidence to go, Okay, yeah, I can do this because
there's so much uncertainty. There's so many guys there, and
there's so many people that have to get cut.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
Yeah, and you just look at what the Broncos disin
went through, right, I mean, so many good players getting cut.
It's not just so many like these are guys who,
if given the right situation, could excel on Sunday like
in the regular season. It's just that they're the odd
man out or for whatever reason. And you never know
this guy who's tenth or eleventh or twelfth who gets
cut or is on the practice squad for a couple

(16:25):
of years but never gets a chance, how would he
have fared if given the chance. Now, there are so
many injuries so often in the NFL that a lot
of these guys who are on the practice squad now
will be playing oh yeah, halfway through the season exactly.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
But speaking of injuries, then when you're in San Francisco.
You have a shoulder injury, right, Yeah, how does your
career because I know they end up cutting you and
re signing you before you get traded to Denver.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah, the shoulder was interesting because it was a college injury.
I had a dislocation in college that I did not
have surgery on because it was kind of up against
the end of the season. If I had had surgery,
it would have taken four months to rehab. There goes
the pro and all that stuff. So I chose not
to have surgery on it and just to rehabit and
get it as good as I could so I get

(17:06):
to the forty nine ers. Obviously they know about it.
You have a physical before the first mini camp, they
caught that instability. I had to sign a waiver for
the shoulder to get on the field. That means for
this specific injury, I signed this piece of paper and
if I hurt this one again, they can cut me.
They don't have to fix it. Other than that, if
you get injured on the field and it's not a
pre existing thing that you signed a waver for, they

(17:27):
have to take care of you and they can't cut
you while you're hurt. But sure, enough, this shoulder pops
out of the socket a couple weeks into training camp.
I did my best to work through it, but I
was kind of a shell on myself and going against
the best in the world with one arm didn't go. Well.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
No, that's tough.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
So I remember right towards the end of training camp,
Steve mary Ucci, who was the head coach of the
forty nine ers at the time, came up to me.
I was standing on the sideline and he said, you know, Nate,
I'd love to keep you on the practice squad, but
practice squad players need to be able to practice. I
wasn't practicing that day because of my shoulder, and I understand.
And the next day I was cut and on the
way out Ted Donahue, who was the GM at the time,

(18:06):
told me, if you get this fixed, then we'll sign
you back next season. So I went back home live
with Mom and dad got it fixed with their insurance.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
And those are the things that people don't think about.
You don't have anybody covering your medical bills at that point.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Nope, I was on my own. They did recommend that
I used their doctor and I was able to so
he fixed it. They didn't pay for it, but I
guess they got the money in aroundabout what.

Speaker 2 (18:30):
They got a referral for you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, So, but the surgery went well. I was rehaving
it at just like a normal rehab facility with the
elderly people who had fallen and me, I'm going back
to the NFL. Guys are like, sure, you are a shun.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
But you're so cute.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
But I did get signed back.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, which doesn't always happen.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
And there had been a coaching change as well. Steve
Maryuci had been fired after going ten and six and
winning a playoff game. They fired it after this epic
come back against the New York Giants. It was a
great game. This was a good team. Mariucci was a
good coach and a good man, and they fired him
because it wasn't good enough, you know, And there's always
internal strife that you don't understand. Yes, but they hired

(19:12):
uh Steve Erickson, who didn't end up working out very well.
He didn't have a lot of success, and he wasn't
kind of that Niner way, you know that that Mariucci
still was so the whole face of the forty nine ers.
The field changed. I mean I was in camp in
two thousand and two with Mariucci and then they signed
me back and I did the whole thing again the
next year with Erickson, and it was just a weird,
surreal thing. It was just like gone, the forty nine

(19:33):
er mystique gone. It's a new era with Ericson, and
I was way back on the depth chart. Well, at
least with Mariucci, I was fighting. If I had stayed healthy,
I would have been in the mix there for that
fifth spot, maybe a sixth maybe practice squad whatever it was,
even though practice squad was only five guys back then.
But with Ericson, I was, you know, tenth, eleventh.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
I was back, Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
And I wasn't getting a lot of reps in training
camp and it was just I was healthy, but I
was just kind of hanging out, you know, a yeah,
and when you're and when you're like and when it's
you know, a ten rep period and you're the tenth receiver,
you get one or two reps every ten to twelve
plays maybe and the play might be a run to
the other side, and what am I doing here? You know,

(20:13):
and then you just it's really hard to show yourself.
I had a good preseason game, I caught a couple
of passes. And then that week following I think it
was the first or second preseason game. We're going out
to practice second practice of the day. Back when we
could have two practices in a day, I was all
taped up.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
And for orange slices and water breaks.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yes, oh man, it's like water breaks every twenty minutes.
They bring it out onto the field.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Yeah it everybody just kind of stops and has a
bill break. Yeah, it's so sweet.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
It is sweet. But I think it does affect the
team building and the chemistry, specifically with offensive players when
they can't have the reps that we used to have,
like two practices was a lot of reps, and now
it's just limited time one practice, and so some of
these young quarterbacks who go out there have a hard
time connecting with their players. I think that's why they
don't have as much time. Great point, but about to
head out for the second practice of the day mid August,

(21:02):
get a tap on the shoulder and there it is,
my very godfather again has summoned me from the second floor,
Bill Walsh. They said. One of the staffers said, Bill
wants to talk to you upstairs. So I put my
helmet in my locker and go upstairs and I have
my cleats on and I can They're like clacking on
the linoleum on the second floor. You know, all these
heads were popping up from the cubicles, like, who's up here?

Speaker 2 (21:24):
Who's wearing cleets up here?

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah, it's just me, you know. I go into Bill's office.
He tells me to sit down, and I sat down
and he said, Nate, I'll get right to it. We've
traded you to the Denver Broncos. Your flight leaves in
three hours. Good luck. Basically, I mean that it was
a very brief conversation. He told me that he spoke
with coach Erickson about what my chances were to make
the team. They weren't good. He asked coach Erickson if

(21:47):
he could make a few calls on my behalf. He did.
Brian Billick in Baltimore was interested, Mike Shanahan in Denver
was interested, and Shanahan said, yep, bring him over. And
so I.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Got there's that connection with Bill, and my got yes exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
And I got traded for a conditional seventh round draft
pick based on whether or not I made the active roster.
So they didn't have to give that up because I
made the practice squad. Oh so they got me for free.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
Denver made out. Wow.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
But it was quite surreal. You know. I was at
the airport. I had to leave my car and my
apartment and my family and I had a girlfriend in California,
and you know, I was a hometown kid and my
parents lived fifteen minutes from the facility, and so I
was on a flight that night and landed and a
guy picked me up from the airport and brought me
over to Valley over there. Next morning, I was a

(22:36):
Denver bronco running out onto the field wearing number fourteen
and just trying to make, you know, make sense of
what had happened, but incredibly impressed with the locker room,
with the feeling, with the vibe. It's really interesting. So
I talked about my love for the forty nine ers
and Bill Walsh and the whole thing that they did.
Mike Shanahan coached there for three years. He won a
Super Bowl there. They won five super Bowls in like

(22:58):
fourteen years there. To me, they were they were the
gold standard. When I got in that locker room, though,
like I described to you, it didn't feel that way
for whatever reason.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Oh interesting, like the mystique.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
I mean, Jerry Rice was gone, Joe Montana was gone.
None of them were there. But there was something missing
from the team, or at least something I expected to feel.
Some of that is just they're my peers. Now. I'm
not a little kid anymore. Yes, I'm not a fan anymore.
I have to make this team.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
You're an employee exactly.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
So part of it is that. But when I got
here and got in this locker room, it felt like
I thought the forty nine ers were going to feel.
Really Mike Shanahan brought the entire system and implemented it here,
all the on the field stuff, but all the off
the field stuff. The way the players were treated, the
way meetings were ran, the schedule, the way the goals
were articulated, the way everything was taken care of off

(23:45):
the field, the way the support staff was held to
a just as high of a standard as the players.
I've become pretty close with Mike over the year since then,
and he's told me about a meeting that he sat
in his first week on the job in San Francisco,
and he had been here for a while before that
he left and he became the offensive coordinator for the
Niners in ninety two, ninety three, ninety four. Well, his
first week there in ninety two, he sat in a

(24:07):
meeting with all the staffers for the forty nine ers.
None of the coaches were there, none of the players,
but all the other staffers. Each one of them stood
up in front of everyone else and described exactly what
they do, what their objective was, how they were going
to do it, and they were all held to a
standard where they all had to be top five in
the world at what they did, and if you weren't,
then you had to leave. That was the way it

(24:27):
was articulated. Mike did that here first day of training camp.
We would have that same kind of meeting here, videotaping meetings.
He learned that there. You know, the offenses of course
was an amalgamation of that as well, but just the
taking care of everything off the field.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
And taking care of players, that was huge for Mike,
which was a big, big thing when he came here
and telling Pat Bollan, yeah, I'll come, but these are
the things that we have to do. And Mike's been
a guest on the show and was just phenomenal talking
about the show, the podcast. It's a show, it's a show.
It was phenomenal about talking about the things that he
wanted for the players because he just felt that was

(25:01):
so important. Everybody gets their own room, yeah, you know,
just the little things that make a big, big difference.
And there wasn't food at the facility, and so it
was like, guys getting to get meals here. We need
to feed them. They need nutrition and it needs to
be on us. Because Mike would go, like, you know,
he didn't tell Peggy this, but he'd go and he'd
pay for things that would come in. And finally it
was like Pat's like, why are you paying for all this? Well,

(25:23):
because it's not here, and so then it just got done.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to hear that whole Mike's
whole story about how he became the head coach and
everything that led up to it. And you know, he
started off in college and he was a transient coach
and he's going everywhere. But back to the Bill Walsh thing.
When Mike was like twenty one or twenty two, he
just started coaching and it was because of he had
a really bad injury. You know that nearly killed him.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Died.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah, Yeah, they issued last rites on him. Yes, and
obviously the doctor said, hey, man, no more football for you.
And so he started coaching right then and there. And
I think within the first year or two he was
a coach, he went to a coaching convention somewhere near Chicago,
near where he's from, and Bill Walsh was a speaker there,
and Bill Walsh was a young coach and he stood
in front of all these aspiring coaches and said, basically,

(26:06):
if you are a receiver coach and you can't coach linebackers,
or you're a dB coach and you can't coach quarterbacks,
or you're an offensive coach and you can't coach defense,
you're going to be out of this profession in five years.
You need to know every single position on the field
like the back of your hand. You can't have a specialty.
You got to know everything. And Mike took that to

(26:26):
heart and he said, all right, that's what I'm going
to do, and he bounce you. Yeah, and Mike does, yes,
and now his son does to the nth degree. Yes,
the way Kyle coaches now is like unlike any other coaches. Dude,
Kyle knows everyone's job in such detail. He can sit
in a special team's meeting and coach the special teams meeting.
He can pull you aside in the hallway if you're

(26:48):
the long snapper and talk to you for twenty minutes
about your technique long snapping. And he does it in
front of everyone. When he talks to the offense, he
does it in front of the defense, and when he
talks to the defense, he does it in front of
the offense. That's rare as well. We would always split up.
Everybody splits up. You do the ten minutes with the
head coach at the beginning of the day, and then
you go offense and you go defense. But what Kyle

(27:08):
wants to do is teach everyone everything.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
It really is important.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
It is because I, as a tight end, want to
hear what the linebackers being taught on how to cover me,
absolutely right, and you never hear that stuff. So to
just sit back and listen to how he's being coached
to beat me, that helps me. And so what you
have with the forty nine ers is just a bunch
of very smart football players. Of course they have all
the talent in the world, but now they have the

(27:33):
intellect and the understanding of the game that most players
are not being taught. That started with Mike, and it
started with Bill. You show the lineage there, and it's
pretty cool that it's come full circle back to San
Francisco with Kyle, who's a steward of that forty nine.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
Or well, I just don't wish it was here in Denver.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Right, Oh, but now we got Sean Bayden.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Now we got Sean Baide. Okay, so back to your
Broncos story. Then you come here in two thousand and three, right,
you make your debut, your NFL debut, and day December
of that year.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Yeah, was activated with one game left in the season.
We had the playoffs locked up. We were going to
play the Indianapolis Colts. Rod Smith rested and Jake rested,
and Shannon Sharp wrested. Ed McCaffrey played in that game
for some reason. I don't know why, because he's crazy,
and he ended up getting hurt. Oh, he did, got
a concussion. So I ended up being active for the
playoff game because Ed couldn't play.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
That's right, I forgot about that. What do you remember
about your debut?

Speaker 1 (28:24):
What I remember is they had to win to make
the playoffs. They were in a battle I think with
the Vikings for the last spot. And so it was
Brett Favan Almond Green and their team was ready and
it was lambeau Field and it was I remember I
was had a tight groin, but who cares about that?
But I remember getting some massage work on it the
night before the game. I remember going out into the
street looking for some food because we'd get there and

(28:46):
I was still hungry sometimes, and there was a ghost
I know, I'm like, where are they? There was a subway.
I found the subway and I'm like, where are we?

Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy to stay there in Green Bay.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
Yeah. But then I remember, you know, driving into to
lambeau Field and it was such a different environment and
field than any other stadium.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
It's like you're just.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
Going through a little neighborhood. It's people's like green front
lawns and picket fences, and then all of a sudden,
boat there's the stadium.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
It is and it's exactly like that. People say that,
And then the first time I went, I'm like, oh god,
it's just like they say, here's a stadium.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, And whereas some stadiums and cities. When you're driving
in they're not waving at you. Oh, they're giving you
different fingers.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Oh yeah, you're getting the bird the whole way. They're
the sweetest people.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
They're like they're high welcome.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Come.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yeah, yeah, I know. It was really it was really cool.
It was a little bit of a chill in the air,
but it wasn't too cold. It was you know, late December,
and and then I got to get out there, and
it was we lost. We got our butts kicked, but
it was awesome just being out there. I mean, we
started I think with Jerius Jackson under center.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Dang, there's a blast from yeah, and then.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Danny Canal ended up coming in because Jerrus wasn't playing
so great and we didn't stand a chance that game
because we rested all our best players and the ones
who had been sharpened in prime for that season and
put up a bunch of guys who were going to
hold the place for a week. But it was a
special time for me to finally get out there, and
I played some special teams is out there on offense,
had a ball thrown to me badly that I had
to come back for and bat down the interception. That

(30:13):
was probably my best play. My only action was batting
down an inevitable in interception.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yeah, oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
But then the next week we played India in the
playoffs and we got absolutely torched. And that had ended
up happening back to back seasons in Indy after a
similar season ten and six, ten and six, I think
it was. Yeah, but the.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Second season Pyton Manning, I know, and that.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
That stadium that was probably the loudest I've ever heard
of stadium, those Peyton Manning years, those playoffs, that was
loud Arrowhead, very very loud. Yeah, those two are the
loudest I've ever been at all.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Right, So then after your two thousand and three season,
you then go to NFL Europe for the spring, which
is but you're still how did that work back then?
Because they don't do it anymore. You're still a member
of the Broncos, but they kind of let you do
like a study abroad program.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
Yeah. Yeah, you're allocated allocated, allocated to the Rhyane Fire.
So I actually had a Bronco's patch on my jersey.
Oh okay, so that's where you could see who, you know, yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Belonged to Yeah, exactly you were branded.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yeah, but it was funny because you know, we were scattered,
like the allocated guys were scattered on different teams. But
when you play each other, you know, you hang out
after the game. And yeah, training camp was in Tampa Bay.
So we spent a month in Tampa and that was
just it was brutal. It was back when football was
a little bit more physical, and the training camp was
it was two days, it was hot, it was We're
kicking the crap out of each other. We had an
old school coat Pete cahar Chick who uh is just

(31:36):
exactly how his name sounds right, all ball all the time,
and we were just kicking each other's butts out there,
and you know, I snapped my pinky in half. And
training camp, they had to fly me to Birmingham, Alabama
to get it looked at because that's where all they're
They contracted out Health South to do all the major
rehab stuff and that's where their hub is. So if
you had a significant injury, it was going to require

(31:58):
some medical attention other than just like ice and stem,
they sent you to Birmingham. So I flew to Birmingham,
spent two days there over a pinky, but it was
shattered really bad, I mean, and they were trying to
determine whether or not to do surgery on it. They didn't,
and it never fully.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
I was going to say, it's at you and TD
both got a pinky like that. He's got one of
those two.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
There's a lot of those crooked figures out there. I
don't know if you've seen rod Smith. They're all pointing
in different directions, and there's an analyst Brian Baldinger too
ever in front of the boy.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Was like, whoa buddy, but those are you pointing?

Speaker 1 (32:27):
Yes? Please? So I came back and finished training camp there,
and then we went out to Germany. In our first
game there, I was having a great game. I had
a couple of catches, a big one for like fifty
something yards, and then late in the game, someone fell
on my knee and I popped my MCL. So back
on an airplane to Birmingham. I went spent four weeks

(32:47):
there rehabbing the MCL until I get medically cleared. Then
I went back to Germany and I finished the season
five more games.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
What a great experience though it was incredible.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
German fans were very gracious very lovely, didn'tcessarily understand the
game as well as they and everyone in the stands
had a whistle, which is let him bring him in
a little problematic. You're always taught as a kid play
the whistle. Couldn't do that in Germany.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Oh my gosh, that's wild. So then you come back
here and how long do you have before you start
training camp again? You don't have very long. I'm assuming
I got.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
Back here at night and the next day was a
mini camp.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
Oh geez, okay, and.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
The level competition had changed slightly because now I had
been going against the you know, the Ryan Fire and
NFL eure Up corners who were good. But we had
signed a guy in the offseason here who's a bit better,
Chat Bailey. So here I have the first day back
doing one on ones against Champ. But he ended up,
you know, sharpening me very well.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Yeah, those players can make you so much much better players.
So there's a it's a double edged sword. Yes, they
can torch you in practice and make you better.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
They make you better. And you know that's why we
talk about patser Tan. It's not just patser Tan who
got all this money and he great. Everyone who gets
to play against him every day gets better because he's
so great, And so all those receivers are going to
get better a lot faster having to go against him
every day. The other dbs in the room are going
to get better faster watching him perform every day. So
the effect that a player like Champ had on the

(34:15):
team and on me as a young player was pretty profound.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
That's cool. So the next year and oh five, they
switched you from wide receiver to tight end.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
That's right?

Speaker 2 (34:22):
And how did that go? Were you okay with that?

Speaker 1 (34:25):
Well?

Speaker 2 (34:25):
I don't really have a ton of choice.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
You know, when you're driving, you and you're in the
off season, you're just driving your car and get a
call and it's Mike Shanahan and he's like.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
You take it?

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah? He asks, calling Yeah, and then he says, you know,
we've been talking about it and thinking about ways for
you to get more involved in the offense, and I
think and we think that a move to tight end
would be good for you. Okay, coach? Sure?

Speaker 2 (34:48):
He presented that very well?

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Oh yeah, how we well? Shannon Sharp? Yeah, was a
big receiver turn into a tight end? Jeff Putsier. He
had done that with guys before, and I had been
hold before that maybe I should be at tight end.
I never believed it because I wanted to be a
receiver and believed in myself there but the idea that
Mike Shanahan wanted to do that, of course, you know,
I hung up yes and flipped a U turn and

(35:12):
went into a McDonald's and just started eating immediately as
much as I could. It was hard for me to
gain that way.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
Oh how much did you have to put on?

Speaker 1 (35:18):
Put on about twenty five pounds?

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Oh wow?

Speaker 1 (35:20):
Which I ended up losing a little bit of that.
It was a little too much for me. I went
from like maybe thirty pounds. I went from like two
fifteen two seventeen to like I think I got up
to two forty five. Was my heaviest. But I just
hurt all the time.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
And you can't run as fast. You can't do a
lot of things as well. Right.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
It's interesting there's times when you can run as fast
because your body still knows how to do it, but
it's putting a strain and a torque on your body
that you're not used to having. That first year at
tight end was awful. I mean, I had a hamstring
that was bothering me all year. I had horrible technique.
I didn't know how to block these guys. I was
just like a fawn on the ice, you know, in

(35:55):
my new body. It was embarrassing, and I think Mike
Shanahan for keeping me around and give me a roster spot.
I mean, it wasn't that bad, but it was not
up to my standards. And I never sniffed the field
that year. I was one of the inactive guys. Eight
guys are inactive for every game. I was one of
those guys pretty much most of the games that season.
I think I played in like three or four just
sitting there eating sunflower seeds and you know, finding the

(36:16):
ball boy telling them to get me a hot dog
for halftime, and like that was what excited me. And
you know, it's it was eating doughnuts, like Okay, this
is fun. But I ended up settling into a more
desirable weight a few years later, learning the skill set
a little better.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
Yeah. Two thousand and eight, you had a great year,
good career highs all around.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah. Well, and then I still, you know, I got hurt.
I mean two thousand and seven and two thousand and
eight when I was feeling really good that I was
finally feeling like a tight end skill set was coming
in to my play style. Both seasons were ended early
with an injury, and both were in my pelvic region
where you know, like I was saying, the torque that
was I was putting on my body. I still knew
how to run the same weight and cut the same weight,
but now I got twenty pounds more on my frame.

(36:56):
It just eventually snapped. I mean I had a groin
that pop, and then the next year at hamstring pop.
So it was devastating. It's devastating to have any season
end early. I mean, so you think about Tim Patrick
who two years in a row before it ever started,
like training camp, mini camp injuries, and you know it's
amazing that he was able to even come back.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
Feel for those guys, Yeah, absolutely, Okay, So then in
two thousand and nine, Mike Shanahan's fired, Josh McDaniels comes in.
Joshi boy, you have, like many have, the Josh McDaniels
story where it just did not work out? No, what
happened there? Did you any time left on your contract?

Speaker 1 (37:34):
I did, Okay, Yeah, I had a couple of years
I had just signed a new one the previous year.
I had gone through the first year of a three
year deal. Okay, So I was around the facility when
Josh was hired because I was rehabbing that injury, that
hamstring that tour the previous season ended, you know, in
week twelve or something like that. So I was around,
and so you know, I was there when they were
moving Mike out and kind of taking all the posters

(37:57):
and stuff off the wall that reminded them of Mike
and starting over with this guy who was.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Like thirty three, uh huh.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
And I was like thirty at the time. We were
contemporaries and he was a D three guy. So I
went up there to introduce myself, thinking we'd have a
lot in common, and you're laughing because you know this isn't.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
This doesn't end, well, no, it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
So I go there, and you know, Mike's longtime secretary
who had been there forever was replaced by this dude
who was like an again my age.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
And yes, Cindy was the best, Yeah, she was great.

Speaker 1 (38:28):
Yes, And so the surreal nature of turning that corner
and then seeing this guy who was like wearing a
baseball cap like sucking on a lollipop with like cargo
shorts on, like what is going on here? And then
I go in and you know, he ushers me in
to see Josh. And there's Josh sitting behind Mike's desk
and he looks like a little kid in a cockpit
of a plane who they let sit there before they

(38:50):
gave him his little wings, like this, you don't belong here, man.
But I sat down and I tried to just make
small talk, introduce myself and tell him I was interested,
you know, excited about showing him what I could do
and learning his system and all that. And I do
remember trying to crack a couple jokes and he did
not laugh at either of them. So it was like, Okay.

(39:10):
I left that room knowing I was probably in trouble,
and I was, and it was like, you know, a
month later, three weeks later whatever, I had been cleared
and I was back home visiting my parents and I
got a call from my agent. He told me, have
you talked to the broncos I'm like, no, nobody's called me.
And he said, well, you might want to call him.
I think they're letting you go. This is my agent.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
I'm like, what you have to call them?

Speaker 1 (39:31):
Yeah. So I get home and my mom was like, hey, honey,
there's a message on our our answering machine for you.
I'm like, what do you mean. She's like, just listen.
Was Brian Xanders, who was the GM, kind of mumbling
through like a boilerplate, like hey, you know, give us
a call, like the facility type of thing. So I
called Xanders and couldn't get through to him all day long,

(39:53):
called him a couple times. Finally he called me back
and he told me they're going in another direction.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
The infamous word, Yes, direction are.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
You going in? But he's like, if you want an explanation,
Josh is happy to talk to you. And I said, yeah,
I do want that explanation, because you know, in my
mind I had developed a skill set. I mean I
was the emergency kicker, I was the emergency quarterback. I
knew I had played receiver, tight end, I had done
all the special teams. I could be an asset to
a team.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
And everybody loved you. Honestly, you were part of a
good culture of a locker room too. You wrapped, you
did all this fun stuff, and everybody loved.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
You well maybe that's why he didn't want me, because
everyone loved me in the Shanahan world. Oh, and he
didn't want a Shanahan guy or right, And eventually, you know,
Tony Scheffler would be gone, Jay Cutler would be gone,
Brandon Marshall would be gone, all the guys who were
Shanahan guys would be gone.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
He was a very insecure man, Josh. Yeah, but I
wanted an explanation from him, so I called and his
secretary answered the phone and I said, Hey, it's Nate Jackson.
Can I talk to Josh. And he's like, yeah, hold
on just a second, puts me on hold. Twenty seconds later,
comes back. He says, Josh is in a meeting and
he'll call you back. And I said, okay, cool. Never

(41:01):
called back. Never never got that call from Josh.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
So that's how it ended. He just kind of like hmm, okay. Yeah.
And that's the difference between a guy like Josh and
a guy like Mike Shanahan. You know, Mike Shanahan knows
that there's some uncomfortable parts of the job, but you
face those and you have those conversations because those conversations
with a player who's maybe leaving the game for good.
Those ripple into his eternity and it doesn't have to

(41:26):
be good news. But just give it to.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
Me straight Yeah, be a man, be straightforward about it.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
And he wasn't able to do that, And so I
had a lot of bitterness towards Josh and towards the
way it ended here. I loved it here. I didn't
want to leave. I felt like I was coming into
my own as a player, and then that happened. So
I did get signed to the Cleveland Browns for one week.
At the end of that summer, my hamstring was still
in chambles.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
It was.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
I didn't have surgery on it yet, it was just
a PRP injection and so it was still not attached.
Oh and so I actually was feeling so crappy that
I started shooting up hgh, trying to heal it.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
You just wrote about that not too long ago, didn't you.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yeah, And that didn't you know. I think it masked it,
like I felt strong, but it was still waiting to pop,
And so ended up signing with the Browns. Was there
for a week, got cut.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Did you worry about getting tested though? When you went
back and signed with the Browns or would it have
still been I just stopped by then. Okay, I felt
really bad doing it.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
I felt like a cheater or.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
A liar, like a very bond Yeah, I was like
had a secret.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, I didn't like that and so and I was
also achy. I didn't my body was just didn't really
like it. So at some point I stopped it. But
also they don't really test you, like during training camp
for that stuff.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Okay, I feel like it's.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Just during I don't remember every regular season. Yeah, yeah,
like once you make the team then they'll sort that
out now.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
But it was weird because you're then at that point
where you're like you want to do anything you can
to keep playing, right.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
Yeah, And like I was telling you, the skill set,
I mean I had that, and so all I got
to do is get my body right, even though it
was telling me, no, there's something really wrong. But I
kept going, and I, you know, know, somehow it didn't snap.
That week in Cleveland, I got cut by Cleveland, and
then the UFL came calling.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
Yes, the Las Vegas locomotives.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Yes, that's right, they had been calling me all all summer. Actually,
they held it like a draft and they drafted me,
and so the coach was calling me saying, we drafted you,
we want you to play for us. I'm like, no,
I'm gonna be in the NFL. I'm not gonna play
for you guys. But then when it became clear that
the NFL was done with me, I had no other
options and I was desperate and I had, like I said,
the skill set. So I said, yeah, I'll do it,

(43:31):
and so I drove out to Casa Grande, Arizona, which
is where the training camp was, and we stayed in
a holiday in. Jim Fossil was a head coach and
he lived in Scottsdale. So I actually went to Jim
fossil Scottsdale home to pick up my playbook a couple
days before training camp started. And we had our introductory
meetings in Scottsdale at a hotel and that's where they
pushed the contract in front of us that was significantly

(43:53):
less than what they promised. It kept dropping the it
wasn no, it's gonna no, nope, nope. Finally we got there,
thirty five thousand dollars for the season a little different
than the NFL. Yeah, but there we all were we
all made it out there, so okay.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
We're signing to want to still keep playing.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, and we were told, you know, sort of like
they're selling the XFL, and that now is that NFL
teams are going to be watching this like a d league. Yeah,
and they're gonna pluck guys off the roster. You're going
to be primed and ready. They're not going to call
the guy sitting on his couch, They're going to call
the guy who's playing now, because you'll be ready to go.
And we all believe that the same thing that gets
you there in the first place, that undying belief in yourself,

(44:29):
is the same thing that's a detriment on the way
out because you don't know when it's over. I'm not
going to let you tell me when it's over. You
told me it was never gonna be getting Caro.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
It's still there. They're still dangling.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yes, I'll always be able to get out there and play.
So that was a sad couple of weeks. And it
was only a couple of weeks because my hamstring did
explode there in the desert of Costa Grande, Arizona, and
that's where my football career ended. Wow, and so so.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
You never went to play in Las Vegas. No, which
actually is okay because they ended up folding. Yes, they
stop painting everybody exactly.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
You could have seen that coming because from the first
I mean, like I said, we're in Casa Grande, Arizona
at this like multi sports complex where the field we're
playing on was just freshly laid sod. It hadn't even
taken yet. It was like a biblical swarm of mosquitos
that descended on every practice because this is where all
the blood was at in the desert, and they just
came and were just eating us alive.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
None of the locker room was just like a portable
building that had just been installed. The dryer didn't work,
so we'd have wet clothes hanging in our lockers. We
didn't have enough equipment, so they would just throw in
a pile on the floor, all the guys sifting through
trying to find the face mask they like, or matching
knee pads or whatever. To go from the NFL and
to go from this program.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
And to go from Denver to that, it was a
huge shock.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah. I would go back to my hotel room and
be like, what are you doing what.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Oh my gosh, are you doing so your hamstring snaps?
I assume you have to have surgery.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Then I did, okay, And so I came and did
it up here in veil doctor Philipon, who's like the
world renown hip guy. Yeah, and rehabbed it around here
for a while. But also in my delusion, I thought, okay,
I fixed the problem. Maybe there's gonna be another chance
for me now. And then Mike Shanahan got hired to
be the head coach with the Redskins around that time,

(46:11):
and around that time was the grand opening of Shanahan's
his steakhouse. Interestingly enough, that grand opening was scheduled for
months ahead of time. On that day, well two days before,
maybe the day before, was when that was announced that
he was going to the Redskins. So the tenor of
the night changed quite a bit. A lot of his
former players who were going to go to the night
just to schmooz and have a good time, we're now

(46:32):
telling him they were ready to go.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
By the way, I was one of them.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
I'm Coach Washington, Yeah, I'm ready to go. He's like really,
I'm like yeah, really, Coach. It was over for me.
And he knew it.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
I didn't so he never called you when he was
in Washington, is what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
He did not, Okay, and I don't begrudge him for that.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
No, it was time. So how do you then go? Okay,
I am done, it is time to move on. And
what do you do? I mean, You've done a lot
of things since then, But did it take you a
while to figure out? Okay, like writing, I like my music,
I like radio, but it took a little while to
get into some of those things. Because this is fourteen
years yow.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yeah, and I've had quite a few different paths since then.
The first one was the writing. We talked about NFL Europe.
When I went to NFL Europe, they asked me to
do an online journal for the Broncos website, which they
would do for NFL Europe guys. But they didn't know
I was going to really go for it.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
And write two paragraphs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
Well, I wrote for my school newspaper in college. Oh okay,
and so I loved writing, and so I'm like, yeah,
I can write it. Yeah. And then I just really
fell in love with writing about sport and it was
a good fan reaction and you know, people really liked
the journal so much so that when I came back
and made the active roster, they asked me to keep
doing it during the regular season. I did it for
a couple of years.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
I remember that.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
Yeah, so it was really cool. I mean, it was
only a subsection of fans would even know it because
not everybody read that stuff, but the people who did.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
You pull back the curtain. You get to see stuff
behind the scenes, which was really cool.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Yeah, But it was writing about one side of the coin.
I couldn't talk about why we really lost, you know,
And so I knew that there was like a book
in me that really told the real story about what
I had been through that I couldn't tell in that setting.
Stefan Fatsis was a writer who wrote a book called
A Few Seconds of Panic in two thousand and six.
He convinced Pat Boland to let him come and be

(48:16):
in our locker room all training camp, then write a
book about it. So he went through training camp as
a kicker, wrote a book about it. Anyway, we became friends,
and he kind of knew I was a writer, so
he'd asked me questions he wanted answered, and then he
sent me the you know, the manuscript and had me
read through it before it was to catch anything. And
as I'm reading through his manuscript, I'm thinking, this is
pretty good, but I can write a better book about

(48:38):
the NFL. And so when I was done playing and
I knew I was done, I started writing these freelance
articles about different current event topics going on in the NFL.
And then I would send him to Stepan and he
would tell me where to send it. Basically the tone
of it, what it was like, you know, I had
a New York Times op ed or like dead Spin,
very different tone yestely and I ended up writing a

(48:59):
lot of stuff for dead Spin and Slate, but I
had some New York Times stuff. After a handful of those,
I started getting contacted by agents and publishers about the
idea of writing a book. So I chose an agent,
flew out to New York. This was like in January
of twenty eleven. Met my agent that morning in person,
and then we went and pitched the book idea an
hour later. And we had two pitches one day to

(49:22):
the next day, one with Crown Saint Martin Penguin, and
then HarperCollins and I ended up leaving New York with a.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Book deal to write Oh My God.

Speaker 1 (49:29):
To write Slow Getting Up. Signed with HarperCollins, and had
a really good rapport with the editor and he had
an assistant. We all got along really well, same sense
of humor, and they were really the right guys to
bring my book to life. And then I spent the
next couple of years working on it, and then when
it came out, it was just it was great, but
it was also surreal, and you know, you work on
it for so long and then it comes out and

(49:50):
then you think the world's gonna change the next day,
and like you're gonna walk outside and everyone's gonna be like,
that's the guy who wrote that book. Well, that doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
You want get a safe when you're like, there's my
book and.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Like walking around like hey, everybody who not everyone at once,
but so but the book did well, it was well received,
and then I wrote another one. That one wasn't as
well received, but I had some Hollywood sort of interest
in the first one, and so I spent you know,
several years in La writing pilots and taking meetings and

(50:22):
doing this and working on Oh that's hard. It all
amounted to nothing.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Oh but you tried.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
I did, and who knows it could open up again.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
You never know.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
I was a consultant on the film Concussion.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
Oh wow.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Yeah, the guy who wrote it and directed it. I
became sort of close with him. He kind of picked
my brain for some of the NFL stuff. And then
they optioned my book to be a part of that,
so they basically I had been working on a script
for my book, and when they optioned your book, that
means they owned the rights to it for eighteen months.
So I stopped writing my script to work on Concussion
with Peter Landisman.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
But then he told me I was going to be
in the film and there when they filmed it and
all that, and a week before the filming started, he
stopped returning my calls.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Oh my gosh. It's just like the NFL.

Speaker 1 (51:03):
It was worse. It was worse because he told me
stuff was going to happen that didn't happen. And in football,
they don't do that. They don't tell you it's gonna
be something and then do something different. They tell you
exactly what's going on. You know, it's right in front
of you. We saw practice. Here's where you screwed up.
Here's where you gotta be better. Josh McDaniel's never promised
me anything, you.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Know, you never called you exactly.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
But I was promised the world. And that's what happens
in Hollywood, the promises in the exciting meetings, and this
is going to be so great, We're going to do
this thing, and then just nothing.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
You get disillusioned with that. I'm sure, yeah, and you
get back here.

Speaker 1 (51:39):
Yeah. And then I got back here and during COVID
in twenty twenty, got married and had a baby. The
baby was only a couple months old, and I got
this chance to get into radio here. It started when
d mac lost big Al as his partner. So I
knew d Mac from the years and had a tangential
kind of relationship with the fan. I had done some
stuff with them, and so I threw my hat in
the ring for being his co host because we were

(51:59):
kind of ready to get out of La sat in
for a week with him, and that didn't you know,
it was okay. It's hard to do a week of
radio and Denver when you don't live in Denver and
you just fly in. You're like, let's talk Denver sports.
I'm like, I live in LA I don't know what's
going on, and d mac is such a professional helped
me through it. I didn't end up getting the job,
but about a year later they needed some fill in

(52:20):
work and so it was stated that there would be
an opportunity for me here, and so I convinced my
wife and baby to I didn't have to convince my baby,
but I convinced my wife because she's from Virginia, and
you know, we met in California, but we packed up
the suv and in the height of COVID, drove out here.
And that was four years ago. So yeah, but three

(52:42):
years in radio, and it was pretty interesting. You know,
you've been in radio so long, you know how it goes.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
I do.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
You never know what's gonna happen, or who's gonna make
what decision or or whatever. But I learned a lot
and I was using a part of my brain that
I hadn't before. So as a writer, you're doing words,
but you don't have.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
To say them right. You're just saying they're thinking you
can delete, yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
Go back, then back yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
But radio is boom it is.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
You turn that mic on, you don't go back. You
don't go back and well, you had a treat job perfect.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
I mean, you had a lot of great stories and
it was very interesting. And then you know that station
goes through a change, I mean a major change, and
I've had several. I mean I had dmac on two
days after he got fired. I was like, hey, too
soon fired to the name.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Of the podcast. But not too soon for him.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
No, it wasn't. He was like, absolutely, I'll come on.
I was like, all right, because he and I go
way back. We worked at KVPI together, so we have
a long history of knowing each other through the years.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
So it's how long have you been in the biz?

Speaker 2 (53:39):
So I graduated from CSU in ninety two and I
started interning in radio in ninety so, I mean, I'm
over thirty years.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Well you're you're a survivor.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
I am a survivor.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
Well, you're obviously doing stupid. I don't know, you're the best,
that's why.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So let's fast forward,
Nate to what you're doing now, because you're still involved
in some really cool things. You're full time now at
Gorilla Sports, which I think is really cool, and they've
got some neat stuff on the horizon, kind of like
a barstool where they're expanding you can be more free form.
Nobody's telling you, hey, you have to concentrate on the
broncos Hey you have to do this. It's and you

(54:15):
can bring ideas to them and they've got the resources
to support you to do that.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
Yeah, And so a lot of video content. I have
a podcast called dumb Jock where I interview you know,
former players about the transition life after some of the
challenges because you know, we know about we know about
your career, but we don't know what happened afterwards, right,
and what you face and what that's been like. And
I think that's a conversation that a lot of former
athletes want to have they do, and don't have a

(54:40):
platform to have it.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
I've been surprised how many have come on here and
they're like, nobody's I mean, i'd kind of do the
whole life thing. But also afterwards, Yeah, and people are like,
nobody's ever asked me about all this stuff before I
had Gary Kubiak on and Clint's like I learned stuff
about my dad that I had no idea. I'm like, well,
there you go.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
Yeah, it's usually just ball, right, let's talk ball.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
But yeah, let's know.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
Let's about you as a human being. Yes, what did
your family go through when you had to stop you know,
what have you gone through physically mentally? What have been
some of the challenges And so I want to interview
guys about that process or or it's great guys, and
then also media members and I you know, had d
mac on a couple of days ago. I have vic on.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Yeah, those guys, So doesn't that be dumb jobs? It
can be dumb radio?

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Yeah, media guy. I had Lauren Landau on, you know,
just kind of kind of cover the Gamut. That's great
and it's been really cool, and then covering the Broncos
as well, doing a different football type of show. And
then you're going to do some writing for them as well.
So it's pretty cool. It's it's one of them. It's
kind of a new age media company. It's not the

(55:41):
terrestrial radio signal. You can't find it on your FM
or your AM dial, but you're with a Wi.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Fi signal you can absolutely and then you also we
get to hang out on the sidelines may al for
Broncos home games because you are the new uniform inspector.
So Randy Gradishard did this for years and years and
then in the first preseason game, there you are and
I'm like, where's Randy. You're like, I'm the new Randy,
So explain what you do for that. I've had Randy

(56:07):
on the podcast and he talked about it. But for
those that don't know what the uniform inspector does in
Wade Manning, former Bronco does it on the visitor side
and you're on the Broncos side for home games.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
Yeah. So Randy did it for what a decade or
something like that, a long time and now he's in
the Hall of Fame. Yeah, I got a gold jacket.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
He's fine.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
That's why they called me because they said that's the
path that you go through to get the gold jack.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
But you're next up for the gold jacket.

Speaker 1 (56:29):
That's what Yeah, I think that's what it amounts to.
So I'm waiting for the call. Hopefully it doesn't take
ten years like it did for Randy. They asked me
to do it. I have a good relationship with Flip
Chris Valenti, the equipment manager, long time equitions.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Oh my josh, he's been there forever.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Been there forever, great guy, good friend. But I don't
work for the Broncos. I work for the NFL, Yeah,
and I'm there to enforce their policy. And so I
have a sheet of paper in front of me and
it's got the different violations and I'm just out their
pregame looking at the players, making sure they're not violating.
If they are, I check a box and write down
their number. And I had hand that paper of all

(57:06):
the violators in pregame to Chris Fillenti as he goes
into the locker room before the game starts, and then
he has a chance to tell these guys, look, pull
your socks up, tuck in.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Your jersey, get your knee pads in, get your.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Knee pads in. You can't wear that Britney Spears T
shirt under your jersey. It's showing stuff like that. And
then they get a chance to correct it. And if
they don't correct it, then I mark them down again.
And at the end of the game, I send in
the violations to the NFL and then they decide whether
or not to find a player. I never got fined
as a player. Did my socks ever creep down? Probably?

(57:35):
Did it ever? Come untucked. Probably. I think they don't
like the egregious stuff. They don't like people who just
kind of will get the warning and just say screw
it and keep doing the thing that we asked them
to stop doing.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
Right, They're like, I'll just pay it, right, because they
have their own agenda, right.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
But most players are not like that. Most players want
their money number one, yeah, and don't want to rock
the boat and become that guy for anyone. Right. So
I was always just, hey, I'm happy to be out
on the field. I want to let my play do
the talking. Yes, I want you to notice me because
I made a nice play, not because I have a
cool like headband on that comes out the back or something.
So anyway, most guys are not violating at all. From

(58:10):
the first couple of preseason games, it was typically like
socks falling down or undershirts were too long underneath or
things like that. So I don't I don't see it
being a big problem. Plus Sean Payton, he runs a
tight ship.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
He does he does.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
He's not going to have anybody doing their own stuff.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Nope.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
I imagine it's going to be a pretty cool job.
I get to be down there with you and I
can go anywhere on the field. It's fun walk all
around that thing. And then I go up to the
press box and eat. There's so much food up there.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
Oh, I know, and it's getting better this year. It's
even better. They have different.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
Meals too, Like they have a meal when you first
get there, and they got the one that you shouldn't have.
I should like after I already ate the full full
meal with.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
A carving station. Now wait, I missed the meat. How
did that happen?

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Yeah, I just had like a Thanksgiving meal before the
game starts. And then at halftime they're like, would you
like a chili dog? I'm like sure. The second meal
is the one I got to learn how to be
a little more.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
So you go up to the press box at halftime.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Yeah, I don't need to be down there the whole time.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
Oh, you don't have to be down there in the
second half.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
I do go down in the second half, okay, but
not the whole time. In fact, the halftime is when
I can go up, sit down with some food with
my second meal, and and enter into because there's an
app that I have to put all this information. Oh
and so each player who has a violation has his
own page. He's actually each violation has its own page
that I have to fill out. So if there's like

(59:31):
twenty gigs and a couple of them have like two
different things, that's a lot of just like thumbs on
your phone. That just takes a long time. So I
go up there and start some of that during halftime
while I'm eating, and then I go down in the
second half and you know, check it out. But it's
pretty fun.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
It's cool. No, it's great to see you down there.
And it's funny because I've watched how once the players
figure out who the uniform violation guy is, then they
start to kind of schmooz you a little bit. I
come up and talk to you a little bit.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
But I've only met one of them. One of them
is smoothed me so far. Has do you know who
it might be?

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Let's see who would have schmoozed you. Probably Court Garrett Bowles, Oh,
Garrett Bulls did yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
Really, yeah, great guy. We're both from the Bay Area.
We actually have the same agent.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Oh really yeah, okay, and.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
He's just a super nice guy. And at the end
of it, he's like, so you're gonna take it easy
on me then, right, like, of course, but offensive linemen
they don't. They don't have flashy stuffy They're usually pretty
across the board, abiding by the rules. They're not wearing
anything crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Yeah, one thing I want to ask about. We chatted
about this beforehand. You brought up the fact that if
something is like glaringly they've got a huge tattoo of
you said, maga, you know, on their forearm or something
like that. If something like that happens, you've got to
be the guy that tells them they got to get
out right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
Yeah, to my knowledge, though a tattoo is fine, it
would be something you wrote, like, for example, last year,
I think it was last year, George Kittle, you know,
scores a touchdown in Dallas and lifts up his shirt
and shows like he's gonna get a huge sign for
that because he had a message under his path. Okay,
but if you had like like some guys like will
write messages on their hape that they have there yes,
or some insignia that there's not sanctioned or league sanctioned

(01:01:04):
stuff like if you had like Louis Vatan cleats on
or something like that. New York who's watching these games
and knows exactly what they don't want to see, will
call down to the head ref because they can talk
to him and say, you know, number forty two has
got to come off the field because of his cleats.
He cannot play with those. You got to stop the game.
And so instead of the refs blowing the whistle and

(01:01:25):
telling the guy, the ref will come tell me that
I got to get him off the field. And so
I got to tell Chris Valenci, the equipment manager, that
he's got to and then Chris will tell the coach
and then there's a chain of command there.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
The last thing Chris wants to do is Sean Payton.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
That yeah, I know. And so no player is going
to do that with Sean, right, you know he no,
And if they do, it'll be their last game.

Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
Yes, it will be.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
I guess I do sort of technically have that power.
They push that through me. But other than that, like
these violations are not going to stop play. What they
don't let you have or the dark visors anymore. You
can get pulled out of the game and can't come
back in if you start the game with one of
those on.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
Wow, it's not like they and you can't come back in.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
That's what I to my knowledge, that's what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Yeah, okay, because you'll.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Get warned in pregame and all that. And if you
come out and the game starts and you still have
that thing on, you're not playing. So that's pretty heavy handed.
And for whatever reason they don't want those.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Yeah, they were thanks for quite a while. Yeah, okay, interesting,
all right, Nate. So last question for you. I ask
all my guests this, as you've gone through your career
and even after your career, when you talk to people
and now that you have your podcast too, that go
through the ups and downs, and you've had a few
of those and you've picked yourself back up and figured
out how to move on. What do you tell people?

(01:02:35):
What do you tell And you've got a little one
and a newborn You're going to have to do this
with your kids at some point. How to get past
the tough moments? What's your advice?

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
If you believe in what you're pursuing, it's very easy
to get up the next morning and go give it
your all again. You've got to care about what you're doing.
If you don't care about your path, or you have
no interest in what you're trying to accomplish, then it's
going to be very easy to quit or you're not
going to care if you get sidetracked, derailed, or injured
or fired or told you're not good enough or cut

(01:03:04):
you know, all this stuff. But for me, it was
always easy to get back on the horse because I
was doing something I cared about, you know, whether it
was football or it was riding, or media or whatever
it is. You got to believe in yourself, you know,
and there's a lot of people who are going to
tell you no. I've been told know a lot. And
sometimes credentials can be misleading. Sometimes someone's in a position

(01:03:26):
of power that isn't that smart. Oh yeah, you know,
And it can start as early as being in school
in the real world as well in the professional world.
Sometimes someone holds your fate in their hands, who doesn't
deserve that and will be reckless with that. But then
they have you under their thumb, and the moment they
let you up, it may feel crazy at first, but

(01:03:46):
it's liberating. So you got to look at the silver
lining there when things change, and you got to be
able to adjust the plan and not take no for
an answer. I was always you know, devastated by an
injury in football. But then the next day started to
feel some conviction about not letting this be the end
of my story. I'm not gonna let it end like
this with this injury. No, I'm going to get better

(01:04:08):
and the best lies ahead for me. And now that
I have a family, and I got a four year
old boy and a little girl and a wife, it's
it's a lot easier when you have something more than yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
Yes, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
And for me, when it was football, it was just
it was just me. It was just me and my
journey and what I wanted to be and what I
wanted to accomplish. It was a very kind of selfish,
myopic view of success. But now that there's more than
me involved, that there are other people who are counting
on me, not just to provide, but to be an example,
it's really easy to get up, you know, if I
have a hard day, it's really easy to get up
in the morning and give it another shot.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Oh absolutely, we got that family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
All right, Nate, this was fantastic, Thank you, Thank you
for the story. Times and everything else is just and
I've been wanting to chat with you for a while,
but I had to wait till you were done with
your other radio gigs.

Speaker 1 (01:04:51):
I get it, that stupid gig again, just you know,
better off and just feeling like a much better version
of my.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Exactly what you just said. Yeah, you know, you got
somebody with their thumb on you saying do this, do this,
and then when it comes off, you're like, oh, yeah,
this feels way better.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
The world of possibilities opens up all these friends that
I had, and because when I played for the Broncos,
I've made friends with a lot of people in the media, right,
and so when I moved back here and became, you know,
a part of this radio station, I wasn't even allowed
to talk to any of my other friends. It was like,
you cannot engage with any of these people on Twitter online.
You can't respond to anything they say, like what these
are my buddies.

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
And that's the best part of our media here in
Denver is that we are all friends and we love
rasing each other and giving each other a hard time.
When you're set told that you can't that's no fun, No.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
No, it's no wonder. Things didn't work out.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
All right, Nate, Thank you thank you so much. Thank you, Nate.
New episodes have Cut, Traded, Fired, Retired. I released on
Tuesdays on nearly every podcast platform. Get social with the
podcast on Twitter and Instagram at ctf our podcast and
check out the website ctfurpodcast dot com. I'm your host,
Susie Wargen. To find out more about me, visit susiewargin

(01:06:04):
dot com. I appreciate you listening, and until next time,
please be careful, be safe, and be kind. Take care

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