A few years ago, D’Brickashaw Ferguson, a former offensive tackle with the New York Jets, faced a question that often challenges retired athletes: What should I do with my life?
Ferguson — a collegiate all-American, first-round draft pick, and three-time Pro Bowler — retired from the National Football League in 2016 after 10 seasons. He thought about going into broadcasting or teaching. He interned at a sustainability company.
“It was hard to find something I felt as connected to as I did with sports,” he said.
One day, Ferguson, 41, was discussing his career with his mother, Rhunette. She offered a seemingly random suggestion: Why not give nursing a try?
She was a nurse herself, as was Ferguson’s grandmother. Nursing, she told her son, has a wide array of career paths and specialties.
This past spring, Ferguson graduated from Thomas Jefferson University College of Nursing in Philadelphia. He is now a nurse at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health in New Jersey. (While the hospital system shares a name with Woody Johnson, the current owner of the Jets, the team had no part in Ferguson’s hiring.)
And he won’t be wearing Jets-themed scrubs on the job, he said. “That wouldn’t allow me to, kind of, hide in plain sight,” he said. He’d like to be as incognito as a 6-foot-6 person can be.
It’s sometimes said that N.F.L. doesn’t stand for the National Football League, but rather “not for long.” Players who make a team’s regular season roster stay in the league for around 4.5 years, according to a representative for the N.F.L.
Some players struggle with what to do next, said Tracy Perlman, senior vice president of player operations at the N.F.L. They often explore careers in broadcasting, coaching, financial literacy, teaching, real estate, or law enforcement. “Nursing,” she said, “is a newer area.”
Although there aren’t available statistics on how many N.F.L. players have made nursing their second career, The Times spoke to five current and former athletes about their decision. Some are still playing and plan to pursue nursing when they leave the league, while others made the shift after retirement.
But they are all entering a field where men still face considerable stigma, said Jason Mott, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh College of Nursing and president of the American Association for Men in Nursing. It starts as early as middle school, he said, and discourages many boys from seeing themselves as nurses.
Men make up around 13 percent of registered nurses, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the N.F.L. isn’t a traditional recruitment pipeline: None of the players interviewed knew about the others.
“I had no clue at all,” Ferguson said.
With nursing and football, ‘you can’t be timid.’
The path from a bone-crunching contact sport to a healing profession may seem odd at first, said Patrick Hill, a former fullback and running back for the Tennessee Titans who described his roles as two of “the most violent positions on the field.”
But a football career is actually solid preparation for nursing, he explained; players learn “mental toughness and resiliency.”
Hill, 37, is an inpatient psychiatric nurse at U.C.L.A. Medical Center who has also worked in various intensive care units. The profession provides the teamwork and complete absorption that he remembers from playing ball.
“Two minutes of CPR is the longest two minutes you’ll probably ever do,” he said, likening it to the “intense, hyper-focused” feeling players experience during the two-minute warning, the automatic timeout that occurs in every N.F.L. game at the end of the second and fourth quarters.
Both nurses and football players have to act quickly and perform under pressure, Ferguson added. In the emergency department, where he spent some of his nursing clinical hours, he dealt with critical situations like drug overdoses and cardiac arrests.
“In those moments, time isn’t your friend,” he explained. “That’s exactly what was expected of me as an athlete. You’ve prepared. You’ve done all your practice, but whatever that person shows you — and it could be very different from what you’ve studied on tape — you need to perform.”
Nursing is similar, Ferguson said. “You can’t be timid,” he said. “You have to go all in. You don’t have the time to stare and wonder what to do.”
That sense of urgency in the hospital “charges you up,” Ferguson added. “And that was one of the first places I experienced that feeling again outside of football.”
Taking nursing classes while preparing for the Super Bowl was a ‘whirlwind.’
Some players are studying to be nurses while they’re currently in the N.F.L.
Clyde Edwards-Helaire, 26, a running back on the practice squad for the Kansas City Chiefs, has a mother in nursing, like Ferguson. He was inspired by watching her tend to his younger sister Maddee, 18, who has congenital muscular dystrophy.
Maddee spent some time in the I.C.U., but when she was home and still needed significant care, Edwards-Helaire witnessed his mother’s nursing skills firsthand. She showed him how his sister’s heart and breathing monitors worked, he said. When Maddee’s breathing stopped, he watched his mother perform CPR on her.
Edwards-Helaire is currently balancing school with his football career and is on track to earn his bachelor’s degree in nursing next summer.
Last year, he was studying for online classes in health care economics and kinesiology while preparing for the Super Bowl, which he described as a “whirlwind.” (The Chiefs lost in 2025, but when Edwards-Helaire moves on to nursing, he may be the only nurse in the country with two Super Bowl rings.)
Chandler Brayboy, 24, a wide receiver with the Jacksonville Jaguars, obtained his nursing degree last year while in the N.F.L. He became interested in health care after taking a health science class in high school. When Brayboy learned about Parkinson’s disease in the class, he recognized one of his grandfather’s symptoms, a tremor in the hands known as “pill-rolling.” Eventually, he helped his grandfather get diagnosed.
Brayboy plans to be a critical care nurse after he retires from the N.F.L., an interest that’s in step with larger trends: A 2024 report from NurseJournal found male nurses were more likely to pursue specialties like emergency and critical care — fast-paced environments, the report said, that require them to be adaptable, have physical stamina and quickly solve problems.
And while the numbers of men in nursing are slowly increasing — up from 8 percent a decade ago, according to the labor bureau — there’s still a nationwide nursing shortage, Dr. Mott said, so the field is in need of male role models.
“This is awesome for boys to see,” said Dr. Mott, a Green Bay Packers fan.
‘Yo, you play ball?’
Nathaniel Hughes, 40, played wide receiver on four N.F.L. teams including the Jacksonville Jaguars and Detroit Lions. He was partly drawn to health care after repeatedly landing in hospitals with football injuries — a torn labrum in each shoulder, a broken leg, a broken ankle and two concussions over the course of his career.
He got his bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2008, before being drafted, and earned his master’s degree in nursing in 2015 while in the N.F.L.
Hughes spent seven years as a nurse before attending medical school. But when Dr. Hughes, now an anesthesiologist, was an I.C.U. nurse, he generally didn’t broadcast that he was a former pro footballer.
If a football game was on the television, however, he would sometimes talk to the TV screen — and his detailed analysis made patients take notice.
“You know a lot of little nuances that a normal person who just watches football wouldn’t,” Dr. Hughes said. “People can pick up real quick on your football I.Q. just by your lingo. So they start looking at you like, ‘Yo, you play ball?’”
Hill occasionally gets recognized by a patient “if they’re a Tennessee Titans nut,” he said. And sometimes, he added, patients tell him that he’s built like an N.F.L. player.
“Most of them are like, ‘Wow, you should be playing football,’” he said. “And I say: ‘Oh, I’m retired. I did play.’”
He has noticed that this disclosure can make his more reserved male patients feel comfortable. Men are less likely to seek medical care and are often reluctant to talk about health issues. Sports, it seems, can be an equalizer.
“They actually let me completely in,” Hill said, “and the barrier that most men hold up, it falls, because we have some type of common ground.”
Jancee Dunn, who writes the weekly Well newsletter for The Times, has covered health and science for more than 20 years.
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