What To Do The Week You Get Cut
I have been released more times than I can comfortably count. Different cities, different coaches, same meeting. Somebody asks you to bring your playbook. The room is small. It takes ninety seconds.
What nobody prepares you for is the week that comes after. Not the meeting - the week. That is where the damage actually happens, and it is the one part of the process you have some control over. So here is the playbook I wish somebody had handed me the first time.
Day one: feel it, and put a fence around it
Do not pretend you are fine. I tried the tough-guy version early on and all it did was push the reaction back a few days, where it came out sideways at people who did not deserve it.
Let yourself be angry, embarrassed, gutted - whatever it actually is. But put a fence around it. Give it a day. Two if the hit was big. The fence is the whole point: an emotion you have scheduled is an emotion you are managing, and an emotion you refuse to acknowledge will manage you for a month.
Day two: call the three people, not the thirty
There is a version of getting cut where you go quiet and disappear, and a version where you announce it everywhere and read every reply. Neither one helps.
Pick three people. One who loves you no matter what - a parent, a partner, somebody who was there before any of this. One who has been through it and can tell you honestly what is coming. And one who is in the business and can tell you what actually happened, in football terms, without softening it.
Those three conversations will give you more than a hundred sympathy texts. And here is the part people skip: call them, do not text them. You need to hear a voice.
Day three: get the real reason
Before you leave the building - or the next day, if you were not in shape to ask - get the actual reason from somebody who knows. Position coach, personnel guy, whoever will tell you straight.
You are looking for which of three things it was:
- A numbers decision. They kept five at your spot and you were six. This says nothing about you.
- A fit decision. The scheme wanted something you are not. Also says very little about you - but it tells you exactly what kind of building to aim at next.
- A performance decision. Something on tape was not good enough. This one stings, and it is also the most useful thing you can possibly walk out with.
Most guys never ask, because they are afraid of the answer. So they spend the next six months guessing, and the guess is always crueler than the truth.
Day four: separate the decision from the verdict
This is the whole thing. If you take one idea out of this piece, take this one.
A team releasing you is a decision. It is made by a handful of people, on a specific day, with a specific roster and a specific budget in front of them. It is not a verdict on your worth, your ceiling, or whether you belong in this profession.
I know how thin that sounds when you are the one holding the box. But I lived it: I was released by team after team, and then I won two championships. Both of those things are true at the same time. If I had let the early decisions become verdicts, I would have quit years before the door I was actually supposed to walk through ever opened.
Say it out loud if you have to. A decision was made about me. It is not the truth about me.
Day five: go back to the tape
Not to punish yourself. To work.
Pull your cutups. Watch them the way a coach who does not know you would watch them. Write down three things that are legitimately good - you need those, and they are real - and three things that are costing you jobs. Be specific. Not be more consistent. Something like: my releases against press are late off the line. Something you can attack on a field tomorrow.
Now you have a training plan instead of a mood.
Day six: get your body and your money straight
Two unglamorous things that will decide more of your next year than any workout.
Body. Do not vanish from training. Do not train like a maniac either - guys hurt themselves in the two weeks after a release more than at any other point in the calendar, because they are trying to punish something. Get back to a normal week. Sleep. Eat like a professional. The call, if it comes, comes with about forty-eight hours of notice.
Money. Sit down and figure out how long you can go. Not roughly - actually. Rent, car, food, insurance, how many months. Once you know the number, the panic drops by half, because panic is mostly not knowing. And if the number is short, get something coming in now, while you still have choices, instead of in month five when you do not.
Day seven: pick the next rep
By the end of the week you need one concrete thing on the calendar. One workout you are training for. One agent conversation. One league you are researching. One tryout, one film cutup you are sending, one call you are making.
Not a plan for your whole career. One rep. Because the story you tell yourself in this stretch is the whole battle, and the fastest way to stop being a guy who got cut is to become a guy who is working toward something specific.
The part I did not understand until later
When I was going through this cycle, I thought the storm was the interruption and the career was the real thing. I had it backwards.
The seasons after each of those meetings - the ones where nothing was happening, nobody was calling, and I was training with no evidence any of it would pay off - that is where whatever I have was actually built. I call it the standing season now. It is the least photogenic part of the process and it decides everything.
My harvest came in Canada, in a city I had never thought about, in a league I barely knew, wearing a uniform I never once pictured. It came because I was still standing when it showed up.
You are going to be fine. Not because it will work out the way you drew it up - it probably will not. But because the version of you that survives this week is the version that is actually hard to get rid of.
Keep going.
- Rasheed 'Showtime' Bailey
If this is where you are right now, my own version of this story is here, and the framework I built out of it is here.