Why they don't wantto play football anymore

A week before NFL training camps opened in late July, an Indianapolis Colts defensive lineman named Quinn Pitcock delivered a message to his employer: I quit.

A third-round draft choice out of Ohio State in 2007, Pitcock played in nine games as a rookie and was expected to see regular action this season on a team with Super Bowl aspirations. The money wasn't bad, either.

Pitcock had a three-year contract worth $1.267-million. By all accounts, there was no glaring reason for his departure. He wasn't chronically injured or dodging a suspension or sinking on the depth chart. He just didn't want to play football anymore. "It was firmly his decision to walk away," says Joe Flanagan of BTI Sports, the agency that represents Pitcock.

That a gifted 24-year-old athlete would voluntarily abandon a career in the glamorous NFL might make little sense to fans. After all, who wouldn't jump at the chance to play pro football — let alone to grab one of the eight-figure contracts that veteran starters often earn? Ask a player, though, and you'll likely get a different reaction.

I'm willing to bet that more than a few Colts privately admire Quinn Pitcock for having the stones to walk away from the NFL — and wish they had them, too.

Professional football is an absurd proposition. Players collide, physicist Timothy Gay reports, with a force equivalent to the weight of a small adult killer whale. Injuries are constant, and players live with the knowledge that they may wind up crippled, depressed, or with Alzheimer's disease in their 50s. Coaches are merciless jerks. Contracts aren't guaranteed; you can be fired any minute. The media say a lot but know little. Fans scream and curse.

The surprise isn't that a player like Quinn Pitcock quits the NFL. It's that it doesn't happen more often. "When I tell people that I left after five years on my own, you should see the looks on their faces," says Ed Cunningham, an offensive lineman with the Arizona Cardinals and Seattle Seahawks from 1992-'96 who is now a college football analyst for ESPN. "Well, hey, man, it sucked. It was not fun. And oh, by the way, I was getting beaten up every single day at work."

That unhappy reality is rarely acknowledged in public by active players, but it's there. When I spent a summer in an NFL locker room, I learned that the emotional and psychological pressures of pro football are painful for almost all players, barely tolerable for some, and unbearable for a few.

Performance, of course, is every player's sword of Damocles. Fans and media supply their vocal opinions. What fans or media say shouldn't matter — after all, their role isn't to view players as actual human beings — but to some athletes, it does. More burdensome are the daily critiques from coaches on the practice field and in meeting rooms, which do matter. After every game, players are "graded out" on multiple details of technique and execution.

Injury is another common source of distress for NFL players. For some players, it can be a ticket out of the league. David McDuff, a psychiatrist for the Baltimore Ravens, says injuries can leave players feeling isolated, guilty and fearful. A lack of experience with being hurt only makes it worse. "It can make your self-confidence plummet," McDuff says. "And I mean fast. Within six hours of an injury."

Then add this to a player's burden: responsibility to a host of other people. McDuff says immediate intervention by team officials, health professionals and trusted family and friends can quell an athlete crisis. But intense publicity can make it seem as if the triggering event "happened hundreds of thousands of times, not once, in the psyche of the public." The Denver Broncos, with whom I embedded as a placekicker, employ a full-time psychologist who has an office near the locker room, attends practices and encourages players to talk.

As a culture, football isn't touchy-feely. "Because it's such a testosterone-driven sport, it's very hard to express any weakness at any time to anyone," player agent Peter Schaffer says. "It's like the remedy creates more problems than the actual problem."

Or, to put it another way, a player who owns up to his problems might think he'll be perceived as less than tough, threatening his status in the locker room. And it's not as if sportswriters are sympathetic after the fact.

Plenty of NFL players have suffered publicly before finding the emotional maturity to survive in the league. (Exhibit A: the Miami Dolphins' worldly and thoughtful running back Ricky Williams.) But there also are plenty of other players who have decided that the sport isn't for them. Some are comparatively anonymous, like Quinn Pitcock and Ed Cunningham. Others are better known thanks to stellar, if short, careers, from the legendary Jim Brown to the superb 1990s running back Robert Smith.

Quitting outright is a dramatic endpoint, to be sure. But it shouldn't be an illogical one. "I'm really much more amazed by the people who continue to grind it out," says Joel Goldberg, who was a psychologist for the New York Giants and other NFL teams for more than two decades. "Honestly, the brighter ones quit."

Stefan Fatsis is the author, most recently, of A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-foot-8, 170-pound, 43-year-old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL.