New York Giants tight end Rhett Ellison has officially announced his retirement from the NFL.
New York Giants tight end Rhett Ellison was known to be mulling retirement in recent weeks, and on Monday he made it official.
Ellison announced his retirement from professional football in a statement released by the Giants’ public relations department.
“The past few weeks, it’s kind of been an emotional rollercoaster,” Ellison said. “But the overwhelming feeling I have is gratitude. Just thinking back to all the people in my life, even before I put pads on, that were able to nurture and grow the gifts God put into me and make this career possible. I think that was the biggest thing that was the fun part about the retirement process, which is reflecting on those people, thanking those people, reaching out and just the lessons they taught me, the tools they gave me for my life after football.”
Ellison suffered a concussion against the New York Jets on November 10 and proceeded to miss the team’s final six games, finishing the 2019 season with 18 receptions for 167 yards and one touchdown.
“In the back of my head, there’s always that, ‘I get it, this could be my last game,’ just because of the nature of the sport,” he said. “When I ruptured my patella tendon (in 2016), that was the first time I realized, ‘Oh wait, this can end at any moment.’ Since that injury, it’s kind of stuck with me, like, ‘Don’t take these games for granted. Don’t take these opportunities for granted.’ I was never surprised. I know injuries are a part of the game. There’s no way I could have told you that was going to be my last game, but it ended up being my last game. But my mentality, just from having multiple injuries throughout my career, was you realize how short your time is on the field and you never really know when it’s going to end.”
Ellison signed with the Giants in 2017 after five seasons with the Minnesota Vikings and was a productive and reliable member of the team. Around the community, he was a rock.
“The people I met when I was with the Giants made such an impact on me,” Ellison said. “One of the coolest things I got to be a part of was made possible by the Giants and it had nothing to do with playing on the field. The Giants opened up their doors to about 100 homeless people in Newark and created this event off an idea that myself and Jenny (Schumm DePaul) at Project Kind came up with. They just rolled with it without hesitation. It was so cool to see an organization open the doors to their stadium to people in need without any kind of hesitation. When I think back to my time with the Giants and just my football career in general, that was one of the coolest things, if not the coolest thing, that I’ve been a part of. The Giants really valued that and they valued me that way. I would definitely say the people there made this special for me the past three years.
“Being a part of the team, being with my teammates, the locker room, the cafeteria, the camaraderie are what I’m going to miss most. I think the process, too, of just the physical preparation. I was kind of weird in that I loved the physical preparation before the season. My favorite time of year was training camp. I was just a little bit off that way. But that’s what I think I will miss the most, my teammates and just the physical preparation. Game days, I don’t know. I’ll know exactly how I feel when Sunday rolls around, but the immediate reaction is I’m going to miss my teammates and I’m going to miss just the physical preparation of the game.”
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