By Hunt Palmer
(Quotes are pulled from Michael Brockers’ interview on After Further Review with Matt Moscona on Tuesday)
With an 11-year NFL career in his rearview mirror, Michael Brockers can do just about anything he wants.
The former LSU Tiger is carving a new path selling merchandise, producing a podcast and working toward a real estate license. He and his wife are also raising four children.
But Brockers needed one bit of assurance before he walked away from the game that shaped his young adulthood and has set him forth on the rest of his life.
“Getting cut from Detroit put a salty taste in my mouth because you never want to be told you’re not good enough,” Brockers said. “I went a couple of month later and worked out for Tennessee, and they told me, ‘man, you look good to me. I don’t know what they’re talking about.’
“I guess I just wanted to know that I was still good enough to play, and Tennessee gave me that with just the workout. Working out, the d-line coach telling me, ‘bro, I think you can still go,’ I think that was enough for me to say, ‘you know what, I am good enough, but I’m choosing not to play anymore.’ So that’s the one up I have on the NFL. I’m choosing not to play anymore.”
Brockers played 160 NFL games with the Rams and Lions after being the No. 14 overall pick in the 2012 NFL Draft. He totaled 29 sacks and 52 tackles for loss while earning nearly $70 million on the field.
It all started in inner-city Houston watching football he couldn’t identify with.
“I didn’t get into football until probably 10 or 11 (years old),” Brockers said. “So, as I’m starting to learn football and watch college, and I’m watching Texas and Texas A&M, and I’m like, bro, they are scoring a lot. There is no defense on the field.”
Those were the days of the wildly offensive Big 12 that wasn’t known for its defensive prowess. It just took a remote control to see something Brockers was immediately drawn to.
“Then I change the channel and watch an SEC game, and I feel like there’s defensive players all over the field,” Brockers said. “Every one of them a couple of months later is getting drafted in the first round. So, for me, LSU was only four hours away, not far from home, the same distance from Houston to Dallas, so I can get home if I needed to in an emergency.”
Brockers arrived at LSU a long, lean defensive end without much of a clue how to play defensive line. His natural athleticism and strength allowed him to excel the prep level. No longer in Baton Rouge.
“When I go from inner-city Houston football to the SEC football, it’s a rude awakening,” Brockers remembered. “I was willing to say, ‘guys I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I’m getting bodied by tight ends in the SEC, and that’s not supposed to happen ever.”
Brockers took a redshirt year in 2009 and watched the older players work. LSU had garnered a reputation of sending defensive linemen into the NFL. Just prior to Brockers’ arrival on campus Glenn Dorsey, Tyson Jackson and Kyle Williams among others had used LSU as a steppingstone to excel at the highest level.
Brockers put on weight and moved down to defensive tackle.
“I went to LSU because I wanted to play for LSU,” Brockers said. “I didn’t know if it was going to be right off because there were some juniors and seniors in front of me. I was willing to wait it out to get on the field. I was lucky enough to have juniors and seniors in front of me who helped me learn the game. I had Al Woods. I had Drake Nevis, Pep Levingston. I had a lot of guys in front of me who helped me learn the game.”
Learn it he did. Brockers exploded onto the scene as a redshirt sophomore on one of LSU’s greatest teams in 2011. He and the Tigers won their first 13 games and an SEC Championship before a sour ending in the BCS National Championship Game against Alabama.
That memory stings Tiger fans to this day.
Brockers was also a part of another brutal Superdome defeat for Louisiana football fans . That came nearly a decade later when Brockers and the Rams took on the Saints in the NFC Championship Game infamously dubbed “The NOLA No-Call”.
Until Tuesday, Brockers had never heard the term.
“I didn’t know y’all had a name for it—the Nola No Call,” Brockers said with a chuckle. “I mean, I was on the other side of it, so I was kind of happy. But knowing that it’s the Nola No Call…it’s crazy because I was a part of the play.”
Brockers recalled Drew Brees’s dropback and delivery for a wide-open Tommylee Lewis. Before Nickell Robey-Coleman decleated Lewis near the sideline prior to the ball falling incomplete, Brockers tried to make a play.
“From the angle the back judge was looking, I was the one jumping up trying to get the ball,” Brockers said.” So, from his angle, it looks like I tipped the ball. Maybe. We don’t know. It’s still the No Call.”
Brockers played coy with Moscona, sheepishly failing to admit he came up short of the tipped ball. But admitting it at the same time.
While Saints fans may never truly get over that night in the Superdome, LSU fans can take solace in Brockers’ devotion to his alma mater and the era in which he played.
“I bled purple and gold. I still do,” he said. “There’s no other college in the world that I’m really worried about. I’m watching LSU. My kids are watching LSU. (My children) will rock purple and gold. Because I’m pre-NIL. I’m not transfer portal. I had to sit behind a bunch of first rounders. I had to wait my turn, and I was willing to do that because I loved LSU. That’s just who I am.”
