Certainly, with my giant overinflated ego, playing in the CFL would have been like failing.
— Ryan Leaf
When people ask where I'm from, I tell them Washington, because that's where I feel the most comforted by the people.
I know the Chargers made mistakes, but I made a bunch of mistakes myself, and I've got to take responsibility for that.
People don't understand that if I would have stayed in Tampa, I might have disappeared and people would have forgotten about me. That may be good in some ways, but not in others.
Every time I stepped on the practice field when I was in San Diego, I dreaded going to work. It wasn't any fun. I didn't like the people I was playing with. They didn't like me.
I had always been a quick healer.
I don't feel bad for myself.
When playing football became a job, it lost its luster for me.
You grow from all those things you go through.
Life is life and there are always going to be struggles. But when you're doing the next right thing it seems to make everything a little easier, a little bit better and a lot happier.
I have a very small sample size: 2-0 to start my NFL career. Talking a lot of smack. And then I walk into Kansas City and put up the worst football game of my existence. And I've always been this brash, arrogant kind of guy.
The NFL Legends Community is the epitome of service. This isn't about promoting you anymore. It's about promoting something bigger than you.
I think that if I was only known for who I was as a football player and only that, it just would have been a tragedy.
The third game of my career, we played Kansas City and I played as poorly as I've ever played in my life. I completed one of 15 passes and had two interceptions.
There was a joke going around campus when I was at Washington State. It went, 'What's the difference between God and Ryan Leaf?' The punchline was, 'God doesn't think he's Ryan Leaf.'
About a year after I retired from playing, I decided that I wanted to getback to college, where I had the greatest time of my life, and to get involved with college football.
I'm not the type of guy who goes to members of my team or the other team and says, 'Hey, I'm awesome,' because I can improve in so many ways.
I mean, Mike Riley is an idiot, but I can't do anything to change that. He wasn't supposed to be a head coach in the NFL.
In college, my best friends were an offensive lineman, a wide receiver and defensive back. In the pros, when you leave the practice field, players go their separate ways because they are married.
I'm the kind of competitor where if I'm able to play, I've got to play.
I don't want to coach in the NFL.
I think the failure in the NFL has humbled me in the fact that I don't think I'm the best.
I don't know if I was ever meant to have that flashy lifestyle.
Being vulnerable is not a weakness.
I was fighting a war on two fronts. I was fighting the best defenses in professional football and I was fighting the media. At that level you just cannot do that. You just cannot do it. I couldn't stop it, and I didn't try to stop it.
A lot of people said they prayed for me. I felt their prayers.
I had many orthopedic surgeries.
I'm going to make a difference in other people's lives because who I am as a person rather than who I was as a football player.
It's hard to transition out of football. Even when you're super successful, guys who have played 18 or 20 years and have won four Super Bowls, they still have difficulty with that transition. They believe they're not ever going to do anything that important again.
Everybody tells me, 'You're going to be fine.' Well, I know I'm going to be fine.
I'm actually pretty reserved.
Guys like me can put on 10-15 pounds in a week.
I didn't leave school early to sit on the bench.
When I enjoyed football the most was when I wasn't getting paid.
Lots of time people have the assumption that I'm making so much money that I don't care.
Everybody's got some things that have happened bad in their past. Mine was just very public.
I kind of got out of the spotlight and life's never been this good.
I definitely don't want to do anything associated with the NFL.
When you're talking to potential professional athletes, I really like to talk about the fact that even though you're a great athlete, that doesn't make you a good person. And if you can build that foundation first, everything else usually follows suit.
When do you realize when you're a kid that you're going to be great and everybody else doesn't understand that? I don't know. I just felt I could beat everybody.
I was an ego maniac with a self-esteem problem and that's what most addicts are like.
If you deny the fact that things are happening to you, that this is going on, whether it's negative or positive, you're just putting yourself behind the 8-ball because you're not facing it head on and dealing with it in a positive way that you've learned how to.
I was a talented egomaniac with a self-esteem problem.
When I came into the NFL, there were three things that were very important to me: money, power and prestige. I was powerful now because I was a famous athlete. I had prestige because I was doing what everybody wanted to do. And I had a lot of money.
