Before being selected by the Miami Dolphins with pick No. 18 in the first round of the 2021 draft, Jaelan Phillips overcame adversity in his football life.
His collegiate career began at UCLA, roughly 80 miles from his hometown of Redlands, California. His father had gone there, and after committing early and graduating high school early, the younger Phillips decided to follow.
However, shortly after coming into college as a top recruit, Phillips found out it wasn’t all fun and games, as injuries started to pile up. It was a sprained ankle in his freshman year that knocked him out for a few games, and then a concussion followed, limiting him to only six games played in 2017.
Then, that offseason, despite head coach Jim Mora leaving along with a mass exodus of players, Phillips stuck around.
His 2018 didn’t go much better. He was in a car accident that caused him to undergo multiple operations and remove multiple bones. Phillips played through pain for the first four weeks before he suffered another concussion and was advised to retire at just 19 years old.
Phillips called it “one of the most important things that ever happened [to him].”
“What it did was forced me to understand what real life is because you know, football is an amazing sport and it really teaches you a lot about life, but also feel like it shields you from a lot of what real life is,” Phillips said on the AthleteAnd podcast.
When football has been the biggest component of someone’s life for years and it’s the plan for the future, to have that taken away forces change and makes one think about their life from a further lens.
“Life is so much bigger than just football at the end of the day, football is just the game, get outside or football man experience things, travel, learn about new things, read books, just finding out what you like, what makes you tick,” Phillips said. “I think that’s the most important thing because you know, once football is taken away, if you already have all these passions and all these hobbies that you have, all you have to do is take the discipline that you have in football, and then apply that to whatever else it is that you want to pursue in life.”
After spending some time diving into music and struggling to find his next step, Phillips eventually entered his name into the transfer portal and joined the Miami Hurricanes. His performance in 2020 (45 tackles, 15.5 tackles for loss and eight sacks) earned him the honor of being selected in the first round.
Now, Phillips is making plays on the field for the Dolphins. This past season, he broke the franchise’s rookie record for sacks in a season (previously set by Bill Stanfill in 1969) with 8.5.
It’s been a strong start to his NFL career, and the future is bright for the introspective, young linebacker. That adversity that he faced in his college days will surely help him in his journey through the NFL and his life after,