Ed McCaffrey Talks Adversity in His 13-Year NFL Career Journey

Watch Ed McCaffrey Talks Adversity in His 13-Year NFL Career Journey - SportsGrid on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:0013 years in the NFL. Yes. How did that happen? Long time. Three years. Resilience. Yeah.

00:06Just didn't quit. Yeah. You know, you got to overcome a lot of adversity. People telling

00:09you you're no good. You'll never make it in the league. You got to get in my case. I got

00:14cut from a team. Yeah. Had to make a team. Yeah. From scratch. Compete a bunch of against

00:18a bunch of great players who were on the team the year before. But it turned out pretty

00:22good. No. Right. I think one of the one of the great qualities that professional athletes

00:26who last in professional sports for a long time have is resilience. Yeah. Because it's

00:31so easy to quit. Yeah. It's so easy to listen to the noise. You got to believe in yourself.

00:35You got to keep getting up, keep working hard and keep moving forward. I'm a Northeast guy.

00:39I'm from New Jersey. You're from Pennsylvania. How did you end up at Stanford? We used to

00:43play Phillipsburg High School. Is that where you got the state liners? Remember, Ned Bulls

00:46are back in the day. Went to Notre Dame, a U.S. player of the year. Did you cook them

00:49out there? No, they kill. I think they beat us 48 to 7. He was a really good player. Phillipsburg

00:54had like 14, 16 division one players back then at the Allentown Central Catholic. Yes.

01:00And we went to a nine and oh and eleven my senior year. But you know what? I still remember

01:05the bus rides. A.C.D.C. Yeah. Ronnie James Dio Van Halen. Yep. We had a lot of fun. We

01:11were just not that good. Yeah. But the league was very good. We had the defense player there.

01:15A lot of D1 players take on Barkley. Matter of fact, went to Whitehall High School, which

01:18was in the East Penn League. But I was one of, I think, two players that played in the

01:25Hershey game. Big 33, was it called back then? Big 33 game. And I think we played, did we

01:29play Ohio State? I forget. We either rotated Ohio State, Maryland or split it up east west

01:35in Pennsylvania. And I think it was one of two players that left the East Coast. Because

01:39back then, you remember, you know, I visited Michigan, visited Notre Dame, visited Penn

01:43State. They're all winning national championships. Yeah. Took another visit to Purdue and then

01:49visited Stanford. And when I visited Stanford, we had just finished a basketball practice.

01:53And I walked out to my car. Remember how cold it used to get? My hair was icicles by the

01:58time I got down to the car. I might have had a little bit of a mullet. I'm not going to

02:02lie to you. And then I went out to visit Stanford and it was already ranked number one in the

02:05country in USA, in U.S. News and World Report academically. But it was 78 degrees driving

02:11down Palm Drive. You see the church in the background. I'm like, I just came from negative

02:1540 wind chill. So in addition to being a great school academically, it's a beautiful place

02:20to live. And then Jack Elway, John Elway's dad. Yes. Was my coach. Wow. He recruited

02:25me along with Tom Beckett, who went on to be the A.D. at Yale for a long, long time.

02:30And he believed in me. And it felt good to have a coach that believed in me as you would

02:34have it. Yeah. I play with the son, John. Yeah. Years later, we went a couple of Super

02:39Bowls. But I didn't know that at the time. I just really respected him as a coach, really

02:44wanted to play for him. And it meant a lot to me that he believed in me.