The Browns have unbelievable medical resources. I'm always seeking the best help and advice possible. I'll continue to do that even when my career is over.Collection: Medical
My mentality from the day I started playing sports was that you get up, you dust yourself off and you do it again.Collection: Sports
The last person to teach me how to act was my A-level Theatre Studies teacher at school, which I literally still draw on. Got an A!Collection: Teacher
The passion, toughness and determination that you display on a daily basis is an inspiration for myself and for all of my teammates and all the people that wear 'Cleveland' across their chest.
No, but I remember going out to Las Vegas while playing AAU for a team from Wisconsin. I'd heard about this LeBron James guy. We went to the gym to watch his team, and I was very impressed at how big and athletic he was even at that age.
I'm a Clevelander. I've spent the majority of my adult life here. Every day when I come to work, it's 'Let's turn this team into a consistent winner.' Because it would be such a special story.
If I was a stone mason or if I was a painter or building bridges or whatever, there's going to be some wear and tear on your body and your brain. And that's just the way it is.
And I could always count on that day because, those who love good Jet's Pizza understand that one slice of Jet's Pizza is like 400 calories. So I knew if I ate 8-10 slices, I would be able to maintain my weight for that week and basically kind of boost it for our weigh-in on Friday.
Coming in, you're so concerned about learning your job and the things you need to do to be successful individually. Once that's good, you can start to focus on learning guys around you and learning defenses and what they're trying to do to you.
I still spend my time feeling sorry for myself and making serious mistakes.
At university, I said to a girl, 'Before I met you all I could think about was history; now, all I can think about is you'. I thought that was the sort of thing you had to say.
I did a history degree once.
Most period drama is so earnest. A lot of it is about making yourself take seriously things you wouldn't normally.
Men and women have different ideas of what constitutes tidiness. I tend to think it's about things being clean, but my mum and girlfriend are more about how things look.
I live in a flat in central London. I do like it there; there's always stuff going on. But I do crave a bit of peace and quiet.
You don't need to over-dramatise life, you can just reflect it. It's more interesting, in a way, if it appears to ring true.
Who cares if they throw a football that has no air pressure? What does it matter? Why don't we let the quarterbacks do whatever they want to the football? I don't understand why there's any rules.
When the game gets eyeballs in newspapers and on TV, that's what in the end is the goal for everyone.
You just don't eat until you feel like you're gonna throw up at every meal and all of a sudden the weight falls right off.
Even though you strive for perfection, you're never going to play the perfect game.
I want to learn more about the game as a whole and about the finer points of technique across the line of scrimmage. I want to learn more about coverages and blitzes so I can kind of see the game before it happens.
It would be like when the Cubs won the World Series. Everybody in the country has probably been cheering for them for so long because they've been suffering for so long. And you want to cheer for teams like the Browns.
I'm hired to do a job. They expect me to do a job, and that job requires me to get my butt up and get back to the huddle, get the play and go do it another time. And until I can't physically get up, I'm going to do that.
I was more eager to lose weight than almost anything in retirement.
I can say confidently that I don't think Austin Corbett is going to play tackle in the NFL.
You have to be able to process 1,000 things that are happening at one time and be able to decide the right technique to use. And have the reaction between what your eyes are seeing and what your hands and feet need to do.
Your run blocking looks pretty similar to what the pass blocking looks like when you're going with the play-action pass. So you really do have an opportunity to get really good at it quickly.
But the way I look at it is just about every profession in our society: There's some lasting effects. It's just the way that our society is set up. People have to work.
You look at guys with significant Alzheimer's and dementia and the mood swings and the suicides that unfortunately NFL players have been faced with. And depression. Lou Gehrig's disease. These are all things that have kind of been linked to the brain damage from football.
But I do hope that medicine continues to improve and, in 10 years maybe, they'll be able to fix my body better than they did for the poor guys who are crippled up from playing in the NFL in the '60s and the '70s.
Towards the end of my career, I had a lot of wear and tear, a lot of arthritis that was building up. Being 300 pounds for over 15 years was starting to take its toll. I was constantly on all sorts of anti-inflammatories and medicines to deal with the pain.
I was religious with the way I stretched, the way I would do my soft-tissue work, whether it be massages or foam rollers. I was very good about getting in the hot tub and cold tub, and getting in the training room. I also love to do yoga, and I give yoga a lot of credit for my longevity in the NFL.
I think offensive linemen generally took the weight room and the workouts much more seriously, because we saw that it was a vital part of our training. We needed to be big and strong, and our muscles needed to be in good shape to handle the beatings.
It's important to try and balance my own diet, my own health, my own lifestyle, with the needs of my family.
It's just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life... and sometimes... it does not.
Until they study the general population and find out what the likelihood of CTE in a soccer mom is versus an NFL brain, we really have no baseline to rate this study off of.
I didn't want to miss that opportunity to be able to enjoy an afternoon fishing with my dad which is something we had done growing up a ton of times on Lake Michigan and it was funny that it kind of turned into an attention thing than I expected and even more than if I would have gone to the draft.
The idea of going to New York for five days and kinda being paraded around by the NFL as they make money off your every step, and the whole purpose is just for publicity for me to stand there in a suit and go, 'Look at me everybody!'... That sounds horrible.
I'm not sure I really want to step into the booth.
Maybe down the line I think I would like to call a game, but right now, I recognize where my talents are and how much work and growth I would have to have in order to be able to step into that booth.
So while most people dealt with the scale every Monday at the Berea training facility nervous about how high the number was going to be, I was the one that was nervous about how low the number was going to be.
I was always the 250 pound guy that I was when I was 18 years old coming out of high school.
I really had to train myself to eat like a maniac really four or five meals a day until I felt sick, just to keep the weight on.
Goodbye not because I'm retiring, but because I'm merely changing jobs. From being your left tackle to being the No. 1 fan of the Cleveland Browns.
Playing in front of the greatest fans in the NFL is easily the greatest honor that I've had in my 11-year career. I hope I was able to make you guys proud in the way that I was always proud when I told people boldly that 'I am a Cleveland Brown.'
I'm not a huge offensive lineman.
If it's an outside zone play, you have the green light to cut-block.
The more space you have there, the better it is for the quarterback, because he's got room to move around there to avoid a rush. And also, after the point of contact, if the rusher does beat me, he still has to go another four yards before he makes a sack. Versus if you drop straight back, he only has to go two more yards.
Even though you wouldn't want to line a D-lineman and running back up across from each other to block, when you get help initially from the guard, and then the defensive tackle gets picked up by the running back, it's not as bad as a lot of people would think versus if you're just putting that matchup on paper.
David Bakhtiari is a guy I like to watch. He's an exceptional left tackle.