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.
Joe Thomas
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.
If it's an outside zone play, you have the green light to cut-block.
I still spend my time feeling sorry for myself and making serious mistakes.
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 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.
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.
Imagine if you grew up in a place and the team was bad for a long time and there's almost like a pride in being able to stay here and stick it out, knowing that you're going to get to where you promised yourself and you've been promised at some point.
In order to spur progress, we all need to be people who point out and shine a spotlight on racism wherever we see it. It doesn't always have to be confrontational, but it does need to become the societal norm that racism is identified and not tolerated in any form or fashion.
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.
Antiracism is direct opposition to any idea that supposes one race is better than any other in any respect.
Growing up in a predominantly white area of the predominantly white state of Wisconsin, it was, I'm sad to say, relatively easy for me to go through life without recognizing or reckoning with the obvious signs of racism.
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.
I did a history degree once.
When the game gets eyeballs in newspapers and on TV, that's what in the end is the goal for everyone.
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.
It's just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life... and sometimes... it does not.
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.
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.
I'm not a huge offensive lineman.
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.
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.
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.
I love Cleveland. I really do. I love the Browns, I love being a part of this organization, and it's been kind of my career's mission to help turn this team around into a consistent winner.
I'm a Cleveland Brown, that's who I am and I'm not going to change allegiances just to get a Super Bowl title. I want to do it as a Cleveland Brown because that's who I am.
Behavior is individual and projecting an individual behavior upon an entire race is a version of racism. Put yourself in someone else's shoes: imagine what it would be like going thru life having this type of projection on you.
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.
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.
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.
It's important to try and balance my own diet, my own health, my own lifestyle, with the needs of my family.
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.
I can say confidently that I don't think Austin Corbett is going to play tackle in the NFL.
When I was drafted in Cleveland, I wanted to turn this team back into a perennial playoff contender and to win the Super Bowl.
I can hardly think of any players that have really walked out of their own volition while there were still teams that really wanted them at a fair price.
David Bakhtiari is a guy I like to watch. He's an exceptional left tackle.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Even though you strive for perfection, you're never going to play the perfect game.
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.
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.
My mentality from the day I started playing sports was that you get up, you dust yourself off and you do it again.
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.
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.
