Hundreds of players will get cut by NFL players before the start of the regular season, and most of those players will keep working out and hoping for another chance at making it in professional football.
But some of those players may try to make it in professional wrestling.
Jim Ross, who works with World Wrestling Entertainment in talent development, has a meeting scheduled with the NFL Players Association today in which he’ll make the case that football players who lose their jobs on NFL teams should be informed that a second career in pro wrestling may be available to them.
“Everybody doesn’t make the 53-man roster,” Ross told Alex Marvez and Jim Miller on SiriusXM NFL Radio. “Some guys are going to be looking for work, and we’ve got some job openings. Maybe we can put the synergies of those two entities together and create something wonderful some day.”
From the WWE’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this makes sense: Pro wrestling needs big, strong, agile athletes, and football produces lots of those. And some of the guys cut by the NFL would bring name recognition from their playing days into the wrestling ring.
There’s also a long history of athletes dabbling in both wrestling and football, from Bronko Nagurski to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and dozens of others in between. If you’re a football player who couldn’t quite make it in the NFL, you could do worse than turning to wrestling.