The only more painful than seeing your team losing a championship is to say goodbye to your favorite athlete. Time comes for all of us, but there is something unique heartbreaking when it comes to seeing an athlete who loves to leave your team.
It is not only the player who leaves, but the pain of the potential not made. Ortentimes is loaded with the lost championships, unrealized dreams and memories of an era in which you would see the players raise a trophy in the color of your team.
Brown fans are going through that Friday with Nick Chubb news corridor will probably not return in 2025. We decided to sit, access our feelings and go to the athletes who left our process.
Nick Chubb: Cleveland Browns
By Jared Mueller, Dawgs by nature
To be clear, Chubb has not left the Browns, but the GM Andrew Berry made it clear that it is unlikely to return. Cleveland fans have dismayed the entire low season about the possibility of Chubb continuing. Together with the member of the Hall of Fame Joe Thomas, Chubb feels like the perfect representative of how people in the city of Cleveland look.
And, unlike most Browns players from the return in 1999, Chubb (like Thomas) was excellent For several years.
Five consecutive seasons with an average yardas for transport or 5.0 or more. Four consecutive years of 1,000 yards running in a team that fought to win games and has not had a star marshal from Bernie Kosar. Then, Minkah Fitzpatrick of the rival Pittsburgh Steelers reached the knee of Chubb in week 2 of 2023 and everything went downhill from there.
A broken foot in 2024 ended its early season, but there were signs that Chubb was the same back as it used to be. I didn’t care and I don’t care about Browns’ fans. Chubb felt our passion and love for him when he recovered from his great knee wounds in 2023:
Chubb’s love for the Batman franchise not only inspired his return; He called his “The Bat Files” rehabilitation plan, but also inspired this incredible hype video about his return:
No longer having the NFL Batman that represents the city and no longer encouraging Nicholas Jamaal Chubb on Sunday is heartbreaking. For Browns fans, the complaint about Chubb’s imminent game will feel for a long time.
Buffalo Bills: Thurman Thomas, Bruce Smith and Andre Reed
By Matt Warren, Buffalo Rumblings
There are many names that could put on this list. They were the last three removal players of the Super Bowl teams of the Bills.
February 10, 2000.
Perhaps the height of 24 -hour cable sports news saw the buffalo bills make a commercial decision that was necessarily incorrect, but it hurt, however. We knew that Reed was unhappy and left, but Smith and Thomas were surprises. According to Thomas, he learned of the ESPN news ticket, not the team. When Smith listened to Reed and Thomas who were out, he would accept to take a salary cut.
That was also a quite sinister low season in Bills’s history. In January, the Bills lost the “miracle of the musical city” in what turned out to be the last game of the Hall of Fame with the Bills, and the team did not return to the playoffs during 17 consecutive seasons. We did not know at that time, but it was just the beginning of our despair.
Carolina Panthers: Luke Kuechly
By James Dator, SB Nation.com
I have never seen a player in my life Luke Kuechly, and yes, this comes from some who saw Cam Newton win an MVP award.
Look, what happens with Newton and Kuechly is that they were Yin and Yang of Panthers football. On the one hand, you had a camera, chiseled in granite to be a physical specimen unlike everything we have seen in the field marshal position before, but whose mechanics and decision making suspect. Then there was Luke, marked as underlined, too small to play supporter, but with an intellectual soccer coefficient that could fill a stadium. They shared a heart and a desire to win, and breaks me every time I think about the fact that Kuechly will never have a Super Bowl ring.
When it was learned that Kuechly retired from the NFL at age 28, it was such a visceral blow that I remember double while reading the tweet. Here was such a consumer, so dominant that he was a seven -time Pro Bowler professional and five times all professionals despite playing only eight seasons in the NFL. He never had 100 tacle in a season, registered 75 cups for a loss, recorded 18 interceptions, a internship for a supporter.
Every moment in which he was involved in each Tackle, each celebration: the Bank of America stadium in Charlotte would shake with a deep and guture joy “luuuuuuuke”. Kuechly was just a phenomenal player, but a lesson for all who once have too small legs, or a physical lack to do something, but they succeeded anyway.
Finally, I don’t blame him for leaving football. In fact, I applaud it for that. Brain shocks are created and the always intelligent Kuechly decided that life was more than football. He left the game for his health, for his wife, for his young children, and I will never hate him for that.
He would still be able to enjoy his brilliance for a little more.
Boston Red Sox: Wade Boggs
By Mark Schofield, SB Nation.com
Or all the teams, it went to the Falfin ‘New York Yankees.
Each sports fan has its transformative year, which makes them fans of a team or teams for life. For me, 1986 was that year. The calendar year not only began with the New England Patriots making a dream race with the Super Bowl XX, but the Boston Celtics won another title that summer, eliminating the Houston Rockets four games to two in the NBA finals, and the Boston MAF.
But for me, Boston’s red socks were my first love.
My grandfather received season tickets shortly after returning to World War II, and they were in our family until the 1990 California. Yes, the Angels had a campocorto that shared my last name, Dick Schofield, but the red socks had my heart.
I loved all that team, but I certainly forged a place for Wade Boggs. For a franchise associated with some of the best batters in the history of sport, Ted Williams among them, Boggs was also on that list. While he was a left-handed hitter and turned from the other side of the dish, I tried to emulate him on my own baseball trip, being patient on the plate-Boggs was known for taking the first launch of each hemed hemed of Hemedde that I would have forwittle by Wittle by Wittle for Wittle for Wittle for Wittle by Wittle by Wittle by Wittle each release:
It was also superstitious like hell, from eating chicken before each game to waking up at the same time every morning. Hello, also, once he instructed the announcer of the public direction of the Red Sox to never say his number, after Boggs came out of a fall in a game in which the announcer forgot to include his uniform number.
The way in which this season ended against the New York Mets crushed me, and the image of Boggs crying in the bank chases me until today:
However …
Something else broke me years later. The 1992 season saw Boggs publish an average batting average .259, the first time in its legendary career in which less than .300 arrived. He arrived at the time of absolute sausage, since Boggs was ready to get to free agency.
Of course, the Yankees threw themselves. Or of course they did.
Seeing Boggs in pintipes was painful enough, but did not end there. Boggs and the Yankees won a world series together, and the Yankee stadium on a horse, and I hated everything.
I still do, decades later.
San Francisco 49ers: Patrick Willis
By David Fucillo, SB Nation
Professional athletes come and go. It always hits you when a favorite leaves your team, but the most difficult thing for me was when Patrick Willis had to retire. It deals with a variety of injuries. But the injury turned out too much. After six consecutive professional settlements and seven consecutive Pro Bowls to start his career, Willis had to retire after the 2014 season due to injuries.
I was disappointed with the news, but was ready for the press conference. In fact, he had a couple of tears in his eyes when I saw his retirement press conference. I have had numerous favorite players in sports in my career, but this could have revealed that Willis was everyone’s favorite. For his career to be interrupted when he was still one of the best in the game, and it could be seen a lot that it hurt to make the announcement. From the leg he has induced the Hall of Fame, but does not make that press conference easier to see.
Who are the athletes who regret having left your team?
