How Asa Watson Rebuilt His Identity After the NFL Cut Him

Asa Watson's NFL career, measured by the box score, does not exist. He signed with the New England Patriots as an undrafted free agent out of North Carolina State in the spring of 2014, was released that August, signed four days later with the Dallas Cowboys, and was cut again before the season started. A tryout with the Chicago Bears that fall went the same way. He never played a regular-season down. Yet in a league where clearing training camp at all is a threshold most invitees never reach, Watson's outcome is closer to the norm than the highlight reels suggest.

Watson, now 33 and working as a personal trainer while finishing a master's degree, told a version of that story on a live taping of Students Incorporated, the podcast produced by students at the International Community School of Bangkok. He talked about catching passes from Tom Brady in practice, playing alongside Russell Wilson in college, and growing up as the younger brother of a longtime NFL player. What he described in the room was mostly about faith and perseverance. What sits underneath it, once you follow the thread further than the interview goes, is a fairly precise map of what happens to the much larger group of players whose football careers end before they properly begin.

The Roster Almost Nobody Makes

NFL careers run short even for players who succeed by every visible measure. The average career lasts about 3.3 years; making an opening-day roster at all pushes that closer to six, and only a first-round pick can expect something near nine, according to career-length research from pro football analysts. Running backs average barely 2.6 years. Those numbers describe players who make a team. Watson's category (signed twice, released twice, then unable to convert a third tryout) is larger still and rarely gets discussed with the same statistical seriousness, because there's no roster line to count it on.

That gap matters: the emotional weight of the sport gets built around the players who make it, while the infrastructure quietly assumes most won't. Watson's own account of training camp reflects that logic without naming it. College coaches, he said, "try to bring you as close as they can get to the limits" during four-month offseason programs that start before dawn, because surviving that grind is what separates a roster spot from a released contract.

A Forced Retirement, Before Retirement Age

Watson's most consequential setback wasn't a cut. It was a heart surgery between his freshman and sophomore years at NC State that sidelined him at the exact moment he was trying hardest to prove himself to coaches and teammates. "It took me out of the thing that I was trying to prove myself in," he said. Sudden cardiac issues are taken seriously in college athletics for good reason: sudden cardiac death has historically been the leading medical cause of death among NCAA athletes, according to research published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, and screening protocols exist to catch conditions like the one that interrupted Watson's career before they turn fatal.

What Watson described next, losing the ability to define himself by performance and rebuilding a sense of self around something else, maps onto research on athletic identity foreclosure: committing so completely to being an athlete that no other identity gets built alongside it. Researchers studying involuntary retirement from sport due to injury have found elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress in athletes forced out early, tied to that lack of a fallback identity. Watson's fix was religious rather than clinical: the surgery, he said, pushed him to "really start to read the Bible" and stop tying his worth to how he performed. But the underlying problem is one researchers have documented for years: what happens to someone's sense of self when the identity built around adolescence is taken away, even temporarily.

Living Next to a Super Bowl Ring

That pressure had a name, and it lived in his own house. Watson's older brother, Benjamin Watson (a first-round pick of the Patriots in 2004 who went on to play sixteen NFL seasons across five teams and win Super Bowl XXXIX as a rookie), was, in Watson's words, "one of the strongest football players in the history of his college," and the standard Watson felt he had to match or beat. Ben Watson's sixteen-year career, against a first-round average near nine, made him a statistical outlier, which made the comparison especially distorting for a younger brother building his own identity in the same sport.

When we compare ourselves to other people, it applies pressure on us, and it can keep us from being our best.

Watson said he eventually realized "some of the pressure that I was feeling wasn't for my brother" or anyone watching. It was self-imposed, built by measuring himself against a sibling whose career was never anyone's real baseline. Researchers see that pattern constantly in siblings of elite athletes: proximity to a famous relative's success compresses a younger athlete's own achievements into "not as good as," regardless of how they'd read on their own.

The System Behind the Comeback Story

Watson mentioned that the NFL Players Association supports players "to help them prepare for the next level," offering classes on starting a business or breaking into commentating. That program has a name: The Trust, an NFLPA-backed organization built around six pillars (brain and body health, career, finances, education, personal relationships, and lifestyle) that partnered with the staffing firm Right Management to help former players translate football skills into other careers. More than 1,200 former players used its programs and counseling in its first year alone, according to NFL-affiliated reporting. A formal, well-funded transition apparatus like that doesn't get built for a rare edge case; its existence is evidence of how routine Watson's outcome actually is.

What Actually Happened Next

The podcast interview stops at "personal trainer working on a master's," which undersells the detour in between. After the Bears tryout fell through in September 2014, Watson didn't wait for another football opportunity. He started cold-calling NASCAR teams, according to a contemporaneous ESPN feature. Roush Fenway Racing's pit crew coach checked with the Patriots for a scouting report and brought Watson on as a jack man for its developmental program, work drawing on the same explosiveness and hand-eye coordination that made him a tight end. It's a detail Watson never raised on the show, but it fills the gap his own narrative leaves open: what a football player actually does with his body and his competitiveness once the NFL stops calling.

From there, by his own account in Bangkok, the path kept moving: three and a half years living in Germany, then a return to the United States to train clients and finish a graduate degree. None of it looks like the NFL career he trained a decade for. All of it looks like the unglamorous shape of "life after the sport" documented in career-transition research and NFLPA case studies alike, not a single dramatic ending, but a string of adjacent jobs that use the same discipline for a different purpose.

Watson closed his appearance with the advice Students Incorporated asks every guest for, quoting a passage he said reframed how he measures success: not by strength, wealth, or knowledge, but by something less fragile than any of those. Whatever a listener makes of the theology, the practical version of his advice tracks with everything that came before it in his own story: the surgery, the brother, the cuts, the jack man's job in a Roush Fenway garage. Build the identity that survives the roster cut, because for the overwhelming majority of players who ever put on a college football uniform hoping for the NFL, the roster cut is what actually comes.

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