Ray Kowalczyk called me Saturday at 7:14 in the morning, which is how I know it was bad. Ray doesn’t call before nine unless somebody’s dead or somebody’s quarterback. He said, “Duke. You gotta watch this kid’s cut video.” I said what cut video. He said, “The cut video. The kid who got cut. He made a video about it.” I poured a second cup of coffee and sat down because I knew where this was going and I didn’t want to get there standing up.
The kid is a tight end I’d never heard of, which is its own crime against the position, and the video is ninety seconds long. There’s a drone shot. There’s a drone shot, fellas. A drone, hovering over a parking lot at 6 a.m., watching this young man walk to his car carrying a duffel bag in slow motion. Sad piano. A montage of him folding his practice jersey like it’s the flag at Arlington. A title card that says THE NEXT CHAPTER in a font I last saw on a wedding invitation.
When Coach DiMaggio cut a kid in 1979, the entire ceremony was a Marlboro butt hitting the gravel and the words “good luck, son.” That was it. That was the whole liturgy. The kid drove home, ate a pork chop, and got a job at the rendering plant by Tuesday. He did not have a content team. He did not thank his village. He did not have a village.
This kid thanked his village. I counted. He thanked his agent, his brand manager, his “content lead,” his mental performance coach, his sleep coach, his recovery coach, his nutritionist, his nutritionist’s assistant, his pastor, his “creative director,” and a woman named Saoirse whose role was not specified and frankly I’m afraid to ask. He did not thank an offensive coordinator. There was no offensive coordinator in the credits. There was a creative director.
The comments are the part that broke me. Forty-two thousand people are mourning this young man like he stormed Normandy. “Stay strong king.” “This made me cry on the train.” “Cut by the team but not by God.” Folks, he caught nine balls in college. He is six foot three. You could not pick him out of a CVS. You are weeping for a stranger who was paid more in NIL money last fall than your father made in a decade of pouring concrete.
Petey Corrigan, who some of you remember, got cut from Triple-A Toledo in the summer of ’78. Drove home in a Ford Pinto that smelled like transmission fluid. Worked thirty-one years at a Sunoco off Route 6, raised three kids, coached Pop Warner on Saturdays, and died last spring with the dignity of a man who had never once narrated his own setbacks over a piano track. Petey didn’t have a goodbye reel. Petey had a goodbye, period. There’s a difference and we used to know it.
The kicker — Ray saved this for last, the bastard — is that the tight end has already been picked up. Not by a team. By a podcast network. They signed him to a “comeback content arc,” which is a real combination of words a real human said into a real phone. He’s going to film himself trying to make it back. The arc is the job. Being cut, in 2025, is the gig. He’ll make more this fall documenting his rejection than he would’ve made on the practice squad blocking for a fourth-string scramble drill. Somewhere Coach DiMaggio is lighting another Marlboro just to have something to flick.
Denise is bringing chili over later. She says she got the recipe off a podcast. I asked which one and she said the one where the host cries. I said that doesn’t narrow it down anymore. She said no, Duke, I guess it doesn’t.