Football
Something that professional football players often talk about is their “Welcome to the NFL” moment. To be more specific, this particular moment is when a player is humbled by the level at which he is now playing. It is generally getting tackled or sacked or something along these lines. Obviously playing college football is very difficult, but taking the leap to the pros can be sobering to say the least.
Recently former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce was talking on his podcast New Heights about his own moment of such kind and brought up a Christmas Eve contest against the Dallas Cowboys at AT&T Stadium, Cowboys Stadium at the time, in which one particular player made it a very long day for him.
That player was Jay Ratliff.
Kelce noted that he did not give up any sacks to Ratliff, but that it was just an extraordinarily long day for him in his rookie season. You will recall by the way that this was the infamous Christmas Eve game in which Tony Romo hurt his hand and Stephen McGee had to jump in for him. The Cowboys would lose on the road against the New York Giants a week later on New Year’s Day in a de facto NFC East Championship Game, the first of three in a row they would lose to each division rival. It remains unbelievable that this happened.
Back to the story though, Kelce paid a lot of respect to how Ratliff was cleaning his clock all game long. Near the end of his story he notes that he (Kelce) got called for holding and disagreed with the official. He then shares that Ratliff yelled out, in Kelce’s own words here, that Ratliff had been “whooping his ass” all game long and earned one of those. The group had a good laugh at that story.
Jay Ratliff is one of the more under-appreciated Cowboys from his time, partly because the team did not have a ton of success. But it is clear that he was quite the defender.
Kudos to Jason Kelce for the story.
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