Cult quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick has ended his career. The 39-year-old played for nine different teams in 17 years. He came to terms early on with never being a franchise quarterback and enjoyed his journey through the NFL all the more.

Munich – 17 years of NFL is enough! At the age of 39, Ryan Fitzpatrick has announced his retirement. The quarterback started for nine different teams and went from a late seventh-round pick to one of the league’s most intriguing guys.

He never appeared in a Super Bowl, was never nominated to the Pro Bowl and has no other notable accolades to show for it. His career-long quarterback rating of 82.4 speaks to merely average talent.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he became a cult figure as “Fitzmagic”. The passer with the long beard thrilled fans with his gunslinger mentality on the field and his Harvard-educated personality off the field.

Fitzpatrick played for the St. Louis Rams, Cincinnati Bengals, Buffalo Bills, Tennessee Titans, Houston Texans, New York Jets, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Miami Dolphins and most recently the Washington Football team.

It paid off: he earned more than 82 million euros during that time.

Ryan Fitzpatrick: Average talent, but lots of passion

What his teams got for all that money?

A passer who doesn’t even have close to the skills of a Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers, but always gave 100 percent and also remained free of scandal.

“I always try to play with passion,” he explained at the start of last season in an interview with All-Pro Reels. “I try to make sure that rubs off on my teammates. If you talk to a lot of my former teammates, I think they’ll tell you they enjoyed playing with me. I always try to lift the guys up around me.”

On how he’s managed to play football for so long? “Part of it is physical and part of it is mental,” he explains. “I just think experience at the quarterback position is so important. My experience is very different from a lot of other guys who have played in the league for a long time because I’ve played in a lot of different systems and thrown to a lot of different receivers.”

He considers the many team changes a part of his life: “Part of my story is jumping to different teams and just trying to make a believer there and show that I’m passionate about playing for these guys. “

New place, new adventure

He has never struggled with always having to adjust to a new environment. “Every time I go to a new place, it’s a new opportunity, a new adventure and a new journey for me. I can reinvent myself every year in a new team and I have to prove myself. I have to earn the respect of the guys. Those are the things that really excite me about this game.”

In part, he joined teams that were looking back on an athletic slump and needed to be straightened out. “In Miami, it was about getting some guys who maybe didn’t believe in themselves before to believe in themselves and know they’re good players,” he says of the 2019 and 2020 seasons with the Dolphins. He then moved on to the Washington football team – the final stop of his career.

Team changes have always involved relocation for him, his wife and their seven children. According to Fitzpatrick, the family developed a good way of dealing with it, “My wife put it best. Every city we go to is a new adventure, not just for me playing, but for our kids going to new schools and meeting new people. That’s how we’ve always approached it. “

Already in high school, Fitzpatrick was underrated

Many team changes are often the fate of players who either demanded too much money everywhere or whose talent was often underestimated. In Fitzpatrick’s case, the latter seems more likely to be true – and from a young age.

“Even when I came out of high school, I wasn’t really recruited,” he reports. After his seventh season in the NFL and his third employer, he realised he would never be a team’s permanent franchise quarterback.

“I probably came to terms with it after my time in Buffalo,” he says. “I was there for four years. After I left Buffalo and went to Tennessee and Houston, I was resigned to the fact that my career was going to be a lot different than some other guys.”

Fitzpatrick is just not a quarterback like any other. But one the NFL will miss.