Being traded or released is a way of life in the NFL, and something that the vast majority of players will experience at some point in their careers. That didn’t make it any easier for Jurrell Casey.
After spending his entire career with the Tennessee Titans, Casey was traded to the Denver Broncos for a seventh-round pick in a move meant to clear cap space. That didn’t sit well with the 30-year-old defensive lineman, who said he had turned down opportunities to leave in free agency even as the Titans failed to contend.
“When you’re a loyal guy and you feel like things are going in the right direction and you’re that centerpiece, you got no choice but to fight it through. My mindset was to stick it out and things would get better,” Casey said on the Double Coverage podcast, via Turron Davenport of ESPN. “For us to get to that point to get better and to be a main focus of that and then you just throw me away to the trash like I wasn’t a main block of that … Coming off an injury the year before and playing the whole season for ya’ll. No complaints, I did everything you wanted me to do and you throw me like a piece of trash. At the end of the day, none of these businesses are loyal.”
Casey signed a hefty new contract with Tennessee three years ago, but this is a way of life in the NFL. There just isn’t a ton of job security for the vast majority of players. Casey has a right to be mad, but it’s hard to suggest that anything should have been done differently.
