Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Ryan Leaf
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American athlete Ryan Leaf.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
I don't feel bad for myself.
When do you realize when you're a kid that you're going to be great and everybody else doesn't understand that? I don't know. I just felt I could beat everybody.
It's hard to transition out of football. Even when you're super successful, guys who have played 18 or 20 years and have won four Super Bowls, they still have difficulty with that transition. They believe they're not ever going to do anything that important again.
I definitely don't want to do anything associated with the NFL.
A lot of people said they prayed for me. I felt their prayers.
I lay my head down every night with a ton of gratitude.
When playing football became a job, it lost its luster for me.
When I came into the NFL, there were three things that were very important to me: money, power and prestige. I was powerful now because I was a famous athlete. I had prestige because I was doing what everybody wanted to do. And I had a lot of money.
Guys like me can put on 10-15 pounds in a week.
I know the Chargers made mistakes, but I made a bunch of mistakes myself, and I've got to take responsibility for that.
I had always been a quick healer.
Everybody tells me, 'You're going to be fine.' Well, I know I'm going to be fine.
When I enjoyed football the most was when I wasn't getting paid.
I don't care if I go 2 for 40. If we win, it doesn't matter.
I'm not the type of guy who goes to members of my team or the other team and says, 'Hey, I'm awesome,' because I can improve in so many ways.
The NFL Legends Community is the epitome of service. This isn't about promoting you anymore. It's about promoting something bigger than you.
In college, my best friends were an offensive lineman, a wide receiver and defensive back. In the pros, when you leave the practice field, players go their separate ways because they are married.
I mean, Mike Riley is an idiot, but I can't do anything to change that. He wasn't supposed to be a head coach in the NFL.
I thought I was a god. I was more important than you, because I could do this thing where I played a silly sport that made me a better human being, in my eyes.
I'm going to make a difference in other people's lives because who I am as a person rather than who I was as a football player.
I kind of got out of the spotlight and life's never been this good.
If you look like a ghost, you feel like a ghost.
I don't make the right choices. I simply don't.
When I bought my first house I had all these red flags on my credit report because I bounced a bunch of checks to places like Pizza Hut and stuff like that for $13 or $15 because I was trying to feed my O-linemen.
People hold me accountable. Before I would push people away, but that's not a way to be successful.
There was a joke going around campus when I was at Washington State. It went, 'What's the difference between God and Ryan Leaf?' The punchline was, 'God doesn't think he's Ryan Leaf.'
I think the failure in the NFL has humbled me in the fact that I don't think I'm the best.
I had many orthopedic surgeries.
If you deny the fact that things are happening to you, that this is going on, whether it's negative or positive, you're just putting yourself behind the 8-ball because you're not facing it head on and dealing with it in a positive way that you've learned how to.
I defy anybody to be of service to another human being and not have the most peaceful night of sleep you've had in a long, long time.
I was an ego maniac with a self-esteem problem and that's what most addicts are like.
I was fighting a war on two fronts. I was fighting the best defenses in professional football and I was fighting the media. At that level you just cannot do that. You just cannot do it. I couldn't stop it, and I didn't try to stop it.
People don't understand that if I would have stayed in Tampa, I might have disappeared and people would have forgotten about me. That may be good in some ways, but not in others.
Being vulnerable is not a weakness.
Life is life and there are always going to be struggles. But when you're doing the next right thing it seems to make everything a little easier, a little bit better and a lot happier.
I had two amazing parents, two younger brothers, grandparents, a supportive community. Really loved.
I don't want to coach in the NFL.
Lots of time people have the assumption that I'm making so much money that I don't care.
I'm actually pretty reserved.
I'm the kind of competitor where if I'm able to play, I've got to play.
Football is just a game. Everybody takes it so much more seriously than it is, but there are many more important things in my life.
There's freedom in being rigorously honest. I lied all my life.
I grew up in a really supportive environment.
I was a talented egomaniac with a self-esteem problem.
People say I'm arrogant or cocky. You know what it is? I feel that I have a good chance to win ball games.
Everybody's got some things that have happened bad in their past. Mine was just very public.
You grow from all those things you go through.
I didn't leave school early to sit on the bench.
About a year after I retired from playing, I decided that I wanted to getback to college, where I had the greatest time of my life, and to get involved with college football.
I think that if I was only known for who I was as a football player and only that, it just would have been a tragedy.
Certainly, with my giant overinflated ego, playing in the CFL would have been like failing.
Every time I stepped on the practice field when I was in San Diego, I dreaded going to work. It wasn't any fun. I didn't like the people I was playing with. They didn't like me.
I don't know if I was ever meant to have that flashy lifestyle.
When you're talking to potential professional athletes, I really like to talk about the fact that even though you're a great athlete, that doesn't make you a good person. And if you can build that foundation first, everything else usually follows suit.
The farther I go East in the U.S. the more I get recognized because of more sports crazy the East Coast is.
We're all flawed human beings trying to be a better person on a daily basis and I didn't figure that out for a long, long time.
The third game of my career, we played Kansas City and I played as poorly as I've ever played in my life. I completed one of 15 passes and had two interceptions.
I do follow the NFL. It took me a while to get back into it, but I do follow it religiously now. Huge Packers and Steelers fan.
I have a very small sample size: 2-0 to start my NFL career. Talking a lot of smack. And then I walk into Kansas City and put up the worst football game of my existence. And I've always been this brash, arrogant kind of guy.
When people ask where I'm from, I tell them Washington, because that's where I feel the most comforted by the people.
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