After 16 years and nine different teams, Ryan Fitzpatrick is calling it a career. The 39-year-old quarterback is hanging it up, sending messages to his former teammates and thanking them for being a part of his professional life — and that list of teammates is extraordinarily long.
Fitzpatrick was never the biggest player, he wasn’t the most athletic, and certainly didn’t have a cannon for an arm, but he made a living being one of the smartest players to ever take to an NFL field. That’s not a reference to his time at Harvard, or the fact he posted the highest wonderlic score of all time at the NFL combine — but a testament to how Fitzpatrick didn’t just play the game of football, but the game of the NFL itself.
In a league that so often uses up players and tosses them away, Fitzpatrick took the league for all it was worth. Here was a guy who turned being a 7th round draft pick into becoming the NFL’s most coveted backup quarterback, a player who always found a way to get paid along the way by tantalizing teams with the promise he could be something bigger than warming the bench.
It didn’t matter that Fitzpatrick couldn’t be a good starting quarterback for more than one season before falling apart. He built a brand on coming out of nowhere, winning games, and making fans fall in love with him. This was the ethos behind “FitzMagic,” but the real trick was always finding an NFL executive willing to write a big check.
All in all, Fitzpatrick earned an astonishing $82,118,420 across his 17 seasons in the NFL. On the surface that might not seem like a lot in a world where $100M contracts are becoming the norm, but when you compare what Fitzpatrick made to NFL greats of his era, the man was a king.
- Fitzpatrick earned $11M more than Troy Polamalu
- LaDainian Tomlinson made $26M less than Fitzpatrick
- Andre Johnson earned just $24M more
Three players, two in the Hall of Fame, one on his way — all made less, or slightly more than a guy who, relatively speaking, needed to take far fewer hits, sacrifice his body less, and sit on the bench more than the other three combined.
It’s flip to try and make this all about dollar and cents, but it’s remarkable just how brilliant Fitz was at weaving his magic off the field. On it, he was pretty damn good as well. Don’t get me wrong, he never really won games — hell, he was 59-87-1 as a starter, but you’re shocked he lost that much because the mystique around Fitzpatrick made him feel like a winner, even if he wasn’t one.
In 2009 he took over for Trent Edwards and Brian Brohm in Buffalo, where they combined for a 2-6 record, before Fitzpatrick took over, went 4-4 and became a hero. The next year he went 4-9 as a starter and was still rewarded with a 6 year, $59 million contact based on the perception he was a winner.
The same thing happened in New York. One good season in 2014 with the Texans caused the Jets to forget about his other middling seasons, giving Fitzpatrick a $10M signing bonus and believing he could be their future at age 33.
Miami, Washington — two more stops, many millions along the way. Always carrying the promise he could be “the guy,” with his time with the Dolphins being so pronounced fans wanted him to get reps over Tua Tagovailoa. There was no worse fate for a young quarterback than playing for a team that signed Fitzpatrick, because you knew people would want to wait for the magic to appear.
That’s why I love Ryan Fitzpatrick. His career made no sense, and all the sense in the world at the same time. He pulled the wool over the eyes of a huge chunk of the NFL’s most powerful executives, millions of fans along the way, and was paid like a king — all while playing like a pauper. It impossible to imagine another player coming along and working this scheme again, as the NFL leans more and more towards drafting young players to ride the pine and not towards aging veterans.
Still, we’ll always have Ryan Fitzpatrick, the man who out-smarted the NFL and turned himself into an icon, all while losing over 50 percent of his games.