Former Packers defensive back and Super Bowl champion Sam Shields played eight seasons in the NFL. Now, he wishes he hadn’t.
Shields, 34, said as much while speaking on Dan Le Batard’s South Beach Sessions show, saying that he now regrets the time he spent in the league. He says concussions are a big reason why and that his head now feels “all mushed together” and he does not feel supported by friends or family.
“When you’re done with football, everybody forgets about you,” Shields said, per Audacy’s Jesse Pantuosco. “Family, friends. I got one friend. In football, I had 10. Now I got one where I know that’s my friend. That I could really say, ‘You’re my friend.’ I don’t even talk to most of my family members. Once football was over, everybody was over with me.”
At one point during the conversation, Le Batard asked Shields if, given the chance, he would do his football career all over again.
“No,” Shields said. “I’d be going to school, trying to work for home improvement. I’d be trying to learn how to build a house.”
Shields spent his first seven NFL seasons with the Packers before missing 14 months following a concussion. He eventually returned to the field in 2018 with the Rams, appearing in all 16 games.
“It was three o’clock in the morning on some night in January 2017,” Shields wrote for The Players’ Tribune early in the 2018 season. “It felt like my brain was cramping, or like it was trying to break out of my skull or something. I was rolling around in my bed, whipping my body back and forth, trying to escape the pounding inside my head. Next thing I know, I’m curled up in the fetal position, shaking and crying.”
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