Football has a 100 percent injury rate. If you devote yourself to the game, it breaks you. This dichotomy — the beauty and the violence — is what makes it so attractive. As a player, you prepare yourself as well as you can for the demands of the job. You train your body and your mind. You put your heart into every moment, and you hope for the best. The longer you stay healthy, in many ways, the luckier you are. You watch teammates succumb — one by one — to the realities of the job. We all will get hurt, you understand — it's just a matter of when.
But then you have a stretch of healthy years that make you feel not invincible, but protected, in some strange way, from the bug that bites the others. And then, one hot day in Tampa Bay, you step wrong and something snaps. And just like that, your season is over.
Broncos tackling machine, superstar Alex Singleton, tore his ACL last week — an abrupt ending that too many football players are familiar with. All of the hours in the gym. All of the days watching film. All of the practices. All of the conversations with your family. And all of the excitement and hope that accompanies each new football season.
It all disappears in an instant.
It happened early in a game he played every snap of. A game in which he led the team in tackles. A game in which his top 10 defense, once again, played great. And now, a game he will remember as his last of 2024. Because of everything he means to this team, on and off the field, this loss hits the Broncos especially hard.
Singleton's path to the NFL wasn't direct. He was cut multiple times during his rookie year, so he went to the CFL for three seasons and won multiple awards, including Most Outstanding Defensive Player. When the NFL wised up, he was signed to the Philadelphia Eagles and led the team in tackling two years in row. And as soon as he arrived in Denver in 2022, he became the spark plug and pacesetter that has helped transform this defense into one of the league's best.
A football team needs energetic tone-setters. Every practice and every game, Alex became just that. His 177 tackles last season put him third in the league. He was voted a team captain by his teammates, smiling every day as he walked out onto the practice field — an environment where smiles can often be hard to find.
Alex smiled, I believe, because he appreciated the complexity of his journey, and he wasn't going to take it for granted. For a first-round draft pick, perspective can be hard to come by. When things get hard, he can start feeling sorry for himself. Mope around. Lag behind in drills and give minimal effort.
But for a man like Alex Singleton, the winding road of his football journey gives him a perspective that allows him to value each opportunity he gets to chase down an NFL ball carrier and do what he does best — bring him to the ground. The glee with which he approaches this violent trade is hard to find, and impossible to replace. Pat Surtain II is rightfully considered the best defensive player on this team, but Alex Singleton has been its heartbeat. Someone will now need to step up and be that tip of the spear that Alex so eagerly represented.
But for Alex, the winding road has simply taken another turn. My own career never reached the status that Alex's has, but I know about winding roads, and I know how it feels to finally get yourself into a groove, and then to have it end with a snapping of a ligament. It is jarring how quickly things change. You are essentially pulled off of the train, and you have to stand there and watch it chug off without you. You no longer go to meetings. You no longer go to practice. You don't eat with the guys. You don't travel. You don't lift weights. You limp around on crutches and jump up on the training table where you are attended to by doctors and trainers. You await your surgery, and once you have it, you begin the long slow climb back to health, not alongside your teammates, but alone, on your own schedule, inside of your own head. It is incredible lonely.
The days become long and isolating. You feel like a ghost at the facility. You lay alone on a table and you hear the sounds of the locker room through the door — the laughter at jokes you're no longer a part of.
One-hundred percent of football players get injured. It happens to everyone, and still, when it does happen to you, you feel like a failure. You failed yourself and you failed everyone else. You let your team and your family down. The one thing on this earth you were born to do — the thing you've been working towards your entire life — has been taken away. This is a dangerous time for an athlete, and spells the end of the line for some.
But something tells me that for Alex Singleton, this will only make him better. This injury will be just another diversion in the long, winding road — a road that he has endured with a smile. When I had a season that was ended prematurely by an injury, after wallowing in my own sorrow for a few days, I would begin to gain the strength of a new conviction — this will not be how my story ends. My football journey will continue. I will be back stronger than before.
Alex Singleton will be impossible to replace. We can only hope that his contagious football spirit will linger in the meeting room, in the locker room, and out on that field, and will light the way forward for the men in that locker room who call him a brother.
About the Author: Former NFL wide receiver and tight end Nate Jackson played six seasons for the Broncos and is the author of the New York Times Best Selling book "Slow Getting Up."
