Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2022. View the full list.
His dress clothes hang idle inside the closet of his north Florida home, a dozen suits collecting dust because he can’t slip them on. Not by himself at least. He settles for athletic clothes most days, the best he can manage without his wife’s help.
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He rarely takes off his sunglasses, even when he’s inside, because light makes his 15-year-old headache scream even worse.
“You know what it’s like living with a migraine 24 hours a day, seven days a week?” he says.
He’ll have dreams he’s still playing, still punishing whatever poor sap happened to line up across from him, and then he’ll wake up, seething and soaked in sweat, growling like a lion before the kill, pissed that it’s over and has been over for 25 years. All he’s left with is a body that’s falling apart and a mind that’s slipping away.
He’ll have fits of crying. He’ll throw up out of nowhere. He’ll hear a horn or a siren or a buzzer and want to turn around and slug someone. He’ll scream at his wife if she cooks with the wrong colored spoon.
When the neighborhood boys tell him they want to play football, and they want to make it all the way to the NFL — just like he did — he chuckles. “That’s because you haven’t seen my hands,” Jeff Herrod will tell them. He’ll watch them shudder after they get a glimpse of his fingers darting out every which way but straight.
Jeff Herrod’s fingers are a constant reminder of the toll an 11-year career as an NFL linebacker can have on the body. (Courtesy of Jeff Herrod)To this day he holds within him a deep, unmistakable sense of pride, not only in how he played but in what he played through: everything.
Herrod’s job was middle linebacker — “seek and destroy,” is how he describes it — and he paid for it. He’d ignore teammates at halftime begging him to stop taking more pain-killing shots. “My body was like the hood of a car,” he admits. He’d slip ammonium tablets in his pants, then sniff them every time he needed a jolt after a collision. He played after half of his body went numb, after he lost vision in one eye, after he’d been knocked out cold. Sometimes, five minutes after the game was finished, he wouldn’t be able to remember a single snap.
“Jeff was like a drug addict when it came to football,” says a former teammate, the Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson. “He was a fiend. He couldn’t stop.”
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Herrod was one of the best players in a bad era of Colts’ football — the one before Peyton Manning showed up. That pisses him off. He feels forgotten, ignored, endlessly underappreciated. He’s made his case for the team’s Ring of Honor, reaching out to owner Jim Irsay directly, but says he hasn’t heard back.
He wants today’s players to know his name. He wants them to listen to him, to see him now.
“Take care of your brain,” he begs, “or you’ll be in the house all day like me, staring at a wall, popping pills, trying to motivate yourself just to live.”
Herrod, 56, says he never once heard the word concussion until a decade after he retired. But he knows one when he sees one. And he knows what happens when you suffer hundreds without ever being diagnosed, left to wade through the darkness while everything closes in around you.
“You know the name Dave Duerson?” he asks, referencing the former NFL safety who died after shooting himself in the chest when he was 50 years old. “That used to be me. I actually thought about how I’d do it.”
The area football league’s $25 fee was too much for Sandra Herrod, and if it wasn’t for the shoulder pads her son scooped out of a dumpster behind the local community center, there’s a chance he never would have played.
That’s where Jeff Herrod found his way to football: inside a dumpster. And, at the start, that’s all he had — a ratty old pair of shoulder pads — so he’d stick old towels or rolled-up socks in the place of thigh pads and play in the grass fields behind the Birmingham, Ala., projects where he grew up. Eventually, he found another league across town, one with no fee, and made the two-mile walk to practice each day by himself.
The plan after high school was the United States Marine Corps. That was until Ole Miss made a late recruiting push with the only scholarship offer he received. Herrod left four years later as one of the best defensive players in program history, and today he’s a member of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame.
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The plan after college? Still the Marines. That was until Rick Venturi, a Colts assistant, made a detour on a scouting trip and stumbled upon the team’s best defensive player of the 1990s. “All he could do was play,” Venturi remembers. “I wrote in my report: If we draft this kid, I guarantee you he makes our team.”
He did. Despite no invitation to the NFL Scouting Combine, despite being a ninth-round pick — No. 243 overall in the 1988 draft — Herrod became the heartbeat of the Colts’ defense for a mostly dreadful decade of football. He was a tackling machine, averaging 130 a year for 10 straight seasons, a team captain nine times, a constant amid ceaseless turnover. Herrod played for six head coaches, including interims, during his 10 seasons in Indianapolis.
He was deeply respected by teammates, coaches, the front office and fans. Here’s how Irsay, then the team’s general manager, described Herrod in the mid-’90s: “If a little spaceship landed and a little green man walked out and said, ‘What is a football player?’ I’d take him out to the practice field and point at No. 54 and say, ‘That is a football player.'”
And here’s how Irsay ended a letter to Herrod after the team released him in 1997: “I count you as a friend and a Horseshoe warrior … your legacy of toughness, will and leadership is secure for eternity. You’ve given your heart and soul to this organization, and the Colts will always be your family.”
Colts owner Jim Irsay’s handwritten letter to Jeff Herrod when the team decided to part ways with the linebacker. Herrod returned for one more year with the Colts after one season with the Eagles. (Courtesy of Jeff Herrod)But to Herrod, the Colts no longer feel like family. He’s grown bitter. He hasn’t been to a game in six years. He was intent on returning for former teammate Tarik Glenn’s Ring of Honor induction in October but was told by a Colts staffer he’d have to sit in the stands — something his body can’t tolerate for three long hours. He hung up the phone.
“Everybody has forgotten about us,” he fumes. “We were warriors. It’s like coming home from Vietnam … you’re not respected. All the posts I see now are about Peyton Manning and the guys he played with. No one acknowledges the work we did.”
Herrod was on four winning teams in 10 years, never finishing more than two games above .500. He never made a Pro Bowl — “the political bowl,” he dismissively calls it. His initial base salary was $60,000; he remembers teammates picking up part-time jobs in the summers, needing the extra cash. Training camp was a seven-week slog back then, two-a-days stacked on top of each other for most of July and all of August. No one had ever heard of a concussion protocol.
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“These guys can’t hold my jock,” Herrod says of current players. “There’s no comparison. I could’ve played 30 years the way they practice today.”
It was a different era, an era in which players went largely unprotected from themselves, and Jeff Herrod — as much as any Colt from those days — is now paying dearly for it. His style was ruthless and relentless. The man was unapologetically unafraid.
“He played as hard as any teammate I ever had,” says former tight end Ken Dilger, who played a decade in the league, mostly with the Colts. “Ask Jeff to run through a brick wall and he’d do it twice.”
“He was born to play inside linebacker,” Irsay adds. “Toughness. Physicality. He was such a leader for us, a force. He had this voice that when he spoke, it sounded like he was on the battlefield, this sergeant leading the troops up the hill. It rang through the locker room and onto the field.”
I destroyed two linemen and made the tackle! Classic! @Colts pic.twitter.com/6uap04BvKM
— Jeff Herrod (@JeffHerrod54) March 3, 2022
But the awful teams he played on largely left Herrod anonymous outside Indianapolis.
“We’re talking bad teams,” says Dickerson, who was with the Colts from ’87-91. “Jeff would’ve made multiple Pro Bowls if he had been on a better team. To a lot of people, the Colts didn’t become the Colts until Peyton Manning, and a lot of guys got lost in the shuffle. Jeff is at the top of the list.”
On the practice field, Dickerson and Herrod were fierce competitors; off it, tight friends. In fully-padded 11-on-11 work during the week, Herrod couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t slow it down, and when it was Dickerson’s turn to pick him up in blitz protection, he’d get blasted. The coaches grew incensed: the franchise’s biggest star was getting pummeled in practice because the middle linebacker refused to ease up.
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“The coaches would yell, ‘Jeff, you’re on our team! Stop blowing up the running back!'” Dickerson remembers with a laugh. “Then they threatened to cut him, but Jeff didn’t care. They weren’t cutting him. He was too good.”
During the Colts’ horrid 1-15 season in 1991, the two started making wagers before kickoff: Herrod vowed he’d have more tackles than Dickerson would have rushing yards. Loser had to buy dinner at Red Lobster. It sounds absurd, but both contend this really happened.
“It’s because we couldn’t block anybody!” Dickerson says. “I remember one game, we played the Bills, and I was getting hit so much Bruce Smith came up to me and said, ‘I’m gonna hurt you today Eric, because none of these guys can block me.’ And he was right.”
And so it went. The Colts got hot in the playoffs after the 1995 season — Herrod had an interception in the AFC title game loss to Pittsburgh that came down to the final play — but all told, he saw just four postseason games across his 11-year career. He spent 1997 with the Eagles but returned to Indianapolis in 1998 for his final season, Manning’s first in town, retiring just before the Colts took off.
A decade after winning just 66 games, the Colts won a league-best 115.
As for his own Ring of Honor candidacy, Herrod gets heated the minute the topic is broached.
“I think I’m very deserving,” he says.
The Colts have considered him, a team executive says. But ultimately it’s Irsay’s call.
Dickerson, Herrod’s close friend, was inducted in 2013 despite playing just five seasons for the team.
“I’ll just say it,” Dickerson begins, asked about Herrod’s credentials, “how the hell is Jim Harbaugh in the Colts’ Ring of Honor? He wasn’t a great player. He was average at best. I’m not shading Harbaugh, but he wasn’t that player for the Colts. Not to me. We know who could really play. Jeff was toughness. He was there, every single Sunday, no matter what.”
Herrod was a run-stuffing middle linebacker for 10 seasons with the Colts, recording over 100 combined tackles seven times in Indianapolis. (Doug Pensinger / Getty Images)Kate Herrod used to go to Colts’ games as a kid, never imagining her future husband was one of the best players on the team. Back then, she had her eye on the quarterback.
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“We laugh about this now,” she says, “but I don’t remember him at all. I actually had a crush on Jim Harbaugh.”
She was still in Indianapolis in 2008, working in public relations, looking for a volunteer for a Special Olympics event. It was enough of a reason to finally introduce herself to her next-door neighbor, whom she’d heard used to play for the Colts. Jeff was happy to help. Soon enough, they were dating, and two years later, moved down to Tampa together. The Indiana winters were beginning to be too much on his body.
By then, a decade after Herrod’s playing career had ended, the chronic pain he was living with was reshaping his daily life, limiting everything he could do. The surgeries kept piling up — Herrod says he’s had 27 so far — and so did the violent, sudden mood swings. He’d rage unexpectedly, snapping at the most trivial things. The headaches never relented. The depression, the resentment, the anger, all of it kept bubbling up to the surface.
If he was triggered, he’d snap. He’d scream. He’d have to leave the room. It never reached the point of violence, he and Kate both said, but it got bad enough that she decided to move out.
“I got my own place two miles down the road,” Kate says. “In my mind, the relationship was over.”
At his lowest point, Herrod says, he weighed ending it all, like Duerson, like Junior Seau, like so many of his NFL brethren. He even considered how he’d do it. “It was that bad,” he admits. “Then, one day, I finally just decided to give all my guns to my wife’s brother.”
He watched the 2015 film “Concussion” with tears streaming down his face. Soon after, Kate called the NFL’s helpline. She was desperate.
“If she didn’t make that call,” he says, “I wouldn’t be here today.”
From there, he started therapy, working with a counselor who specializes in former athletes. He poured himself into his faith, reading the Bible each morning. He began lifting weights again — “I curl 10-pound pink dumbbells,” Herrod says with a laugh, “you should see the looks I get.” He started seeing neurologists and began taking medication, searching for some semblance of stability, fleeting as it might seem, while his condition worsens by the year.
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Kate moved back in. “He did the work,” she says, “and that’s the only thing that made this work.”
Herrod has long decided to donate his brain to Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, but he doesn’t need a doctor to tell him he has CTE. He was a pulsating, helmet-crushing middle linebacker in the NFL for a decade, too prideful to come off the field despite the beating he took every Sunday. “Getting dinged” — that’s what they called concussions back then. Herrod says a doctor told him recently that he likely suffered hundreds of thousands of sub-concussions over the course of his career, defined as any time the brain crashes into the skull.
“And they tell me those are worse.”
1 of many concussions and we see what happens! The coach is pissed at me because I didn’t get the defensive signal fast enough! I don’t remember this playing in this game. 🧠 @SheillaDingus @NFLPA @NFL pic.twitter.com/iy9S9CwaoI
— Jeff Herrod (@JeffHerrod54) October 1, 2022
That’s when the ammonium tablets came into play. Herrod would sneak one out of his pants, sniff it, then try his best to remember the play call.
“I remember telling him, ‘Jeff, you need to slow down,'” Dickerson says. “‘You’re gonna be an old man one day. You can’t keep doing this to yourself.'”
But Herrod wouldn’t slow down. He couldn’t. The game was his oxygen. It gave him so much then. Thirty years later, it’s taking everything from him now.
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“Sh—’s getting hard,” he sighs.
His six children, ranging in age from 20 to 38, give him purpose. So does Kate, who has twin boys of her own. But life is confined, restricted.
“I mean, he wants to have hobbies, he wants to travel, but the reality is he just can’t,” Kate says. “Every day is a complete struggle, and it’s never going to get better. It’s really, really dark and it’s really, really repetitive. It’s like Groundhog Day … but every … single … day.”
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There are little battles each morning — “I can’t even put my shoes on,” Jeff says — hidden amid the weekly war. There’s the mental toll, stripping away his happiness, limiting what he can do, where he can go, stirring mood swings and memory loss while his broken-down body aches from head to toe. He tells Kate the mornings are the worst. Twelve hours later, he tells her the opposite. He’s a prisoner of his past life, left to reckon with the cost of it all. He can’t even play video games with his kids. His hands won’t let him.
“I don’t wish this on anyone,” he says. “So many see me and think I’m fine. They just don’t know. An ocean view looks great until you dive in and see the sharks and barracudas.”
Sometimes, the anger just grabs ahold of him, simmering beneath the surface for weeks before erupting out of nowhere. Several years ago, while Herrod was out to breakfast, a baby screamed at a nearby table. “I thought about pouring my coffee on the kid,” he says.
Instead, he went home and cried.
That was the advice from his counselor: don’t put yourself in environments that will set you off. But it’s never that easy. When date nights arrive each Friday, he and Kate will to dinner about 3:30 or 4 p.m. so they can avoid busy restaurants and the noise that comes with them. Loud tables, the clatter of silverware … all of it gets to him. When he’s in an aisle seat on a plane and someone grazes his shoulder, it takes every bit of him not to snap. He’ll sit there and whisper to himself, over and over.
Lord, help me stay calm.
Lord, help me stay calm.
“It can be as small as you leaving the cereal box open, or you didn’t put your laundry away, and he will just harp on that,” Kate says. “‘You need to do that! You were raised better than this!’ His pain level will be so bad sometimes he’ll just throw up. He’ll get out of his chair at night, and just throw up. When he’s overwhelmed by it all, he’ll have fits of crying.”
Kate Herrod says of her husband’s post-career health issues: “Every day is a complete struggle, and it’s never going to get better.” (Courtesy of Jeff Herrod)The man is 56 years old. He says he feels like he’s 96. Herrod has a running joke with his 99-year-old grandmother and 77-year-old parents that he sees the doctor more than the three of them combined.
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“I’m 62 right now,” Dickerson says. “What is it gonna be like for Jeff when he’s 62? Or when he’s 72? If he even reaches 72? It doesn’t get better. It gets worse.
“And the sad part is there are a bunch of Jeff Herrods out there.”
Still, every Saturday in the fall, he sits in the same spot on the same couch, next to his trusty service dog, Buddy, with his sunglasses on and the TV turned to the SEC game of the week. Every Sunday, he watches the Colts.
Dickerson was right: Herrod is a football fiend, unable to quit the game even if he wanted to.
At one point, a few years back, Kate grew tired of it all, resentful of the sport that’s left her husband in perpetual pain. She stopped watching.
“What I see disgusts me,” she says. “I’ll never let my kids play football, and honestly, I don’t think anybody should let their kids play football.”
In 2011, Herrod was among more than 3,000 former players who sued the NFL, alleging the league failed to properly treat and warn them about concussions. The league eventually settled, and to date, says it has paid nearly $1 billion in compensation. Herrod says the NFL provides resources for doctor’s visits and the like, “but it’s not enough.” His insurance covers a good portion of his medical expenses.
“I receive nothing each month from the settlement,” he adds.
“From the outside,” Kate says, “one of the most frustrating things I hear is, ‘Well, what did he think was gonna happen?’ They don’t have any compassion. They say, ‘Whatever, they knew what they were getting into.’ I get that point of view. At the same time, the NFL does a great job taking care of players who are current. They have all the resources in the world. But the pre-1995 players, they have to hustle for every little thing. Mentally, they’re the ones who need it the most. It’s very frustrating to see these moms and wives who are going broke because their husbands can’t work and provide. And when they go to the league and they get nothing.”
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Each player, in their own way, fights their own war. Herrod has stayed in touch with a handful of his old teammates, swapping stories and sharing updates on life as the game fades further from memory. Among them: two of his closest friends, safety Jason Belser and defensive tackle Tony Siragusa, two mainstays of those 1990s Colts teams. Like Herrod, they carried the franchise through years of disappointment; like Herrod, they were largely forgotten after the stirring success that followed.
Jeff Herrod’s advice to today’s players: “Take care of your brain, or you’ll be in the house all day like me, staring at a wall, popping pills, trying to motivate yourself just to live.” (Allen Kee / Associated Press)The three started talking this spring about getting back together for a fishing trip, a golf trip, a weekend to look back. But it never happened. Siragusa passed away in his sleep in June. He was just 55, a year younger than Herrod. It hit his former teammate like a ton of bricks.
They’d texted just three days earlier, on Father’s Day. Then his old teammate was gone, like so many others.
Herrod knows he could be next. He knows the costs of his career, on his mind and on his body, because he’s paying for it every day.
“When you love the game,” he says, looking back, “it’s hard to say no.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: George Gojkovich and Rick Stewart / Getty Images, Allen Kee / Associated Press, courtesy of Jeff Herrod)
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