“Success is never final, and failure is never fatal.”
That quote has been attributed to everybody from Winston Churchill to John Wooden, but whoever said it, it’s something important to remember as NFL teams got to their required 53-man rosters on Tuesday afternoon. Hundreds of players were told by their teams that their services were no longer required, and that’s always a big hit, no matter who you are.
That’s not a professional death sentence, by any means. Veterans who can’t catch on with one team can still do great things with others. And rookies who don’t make the cut in one city can certainly do so elsewhere.
I mean, the Pittsburgh Steelers cut Len Dawson and Johnny Unitas in the late 1950s, and those guys went on to have fairly decent careers.
So, with that in mind, here are our most surprising cuts from NFL teams as the required roster constrictions happened.