Chris Long: Two Super Bowls, a Donated Salary, and What Came Next
Chris Long retired in May 2019 with 70 career sacks, two Super Bowl rings, the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, and a net worth that stayed around $40 million despite giving away an entire season’s paycheck. That last part is the one that doesn’t quite compute – and it’s worth understanding before anything else about him.
The Long Family and Growing Up in Charlottesville
His father, Howie Long, spent 13 seasons with the Raiders and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. His brother Kyle was a three-time Pro Bowl guard with the Chicago Bears. His youngest brother, Howie Jr., works in player personnel for the Las Vegas Raiders. Chris is also the godson of Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw, which is the kind of detail a publicist would invent but happens to be real.
The family relocated from Santa Monica, California, where Chris was born on March 28, 1985, to Charlottesville, Virginia, during his childhood. He attended St. Anne’s-Belfield School, and by his senior year in 2003 he had 91 tackles, 23 tackles for loss, and 15 sacks on a team that went undefeated and won the state championship. The Charlottesville connection would matter again in 2017, but we’ll get to that.
Growing up watching Howie Long play elite professional football should have created enormous pressure. By all accounts it did. What’s less obvious is that Chris responded by becoming genuinely obsessed with the craft rather than just the outcome. His college position coach at Virginia called him the hardest worker he’d coached in 20 years. That might be a coach thing to say – except the career stats tend to back it up.
College at the University of Virginia
Long played for the Virginia Cavaliers from 2004 through 2007. By his senior season he was the best defensive end in college football – not a disputed opinion. He won the Ted Hendricks Award, given annually to the nation’s top defensive end, along with ACC Defensive Player of the Year and unanimous All-American honors. Virginia retired his number 91 after he left, which programs do not do lightly.
His sack totals built progressively across four seasons, and by 2007 opposing offensive coordinators were consistently scheming away from his side. The Cavaliers weren’t a powerhouse program, which meant Long rarely got the national spotlight that players at Alabama or Ohio State received for similar production. That probably affected his draft stock discussions less than you’d expect. When scouts evaluated the tape, there wasn’t much argument.
The St. Louis Rams Years (2008–2015)
The Rams selected him second overall in the 2008 NFL Draft – the highest a defensive end had been drafted in years. He signed a six-year, $56.5 million contract with $29 million guaranteed on July 19, 2008. Six weeks later, he recorded his first career sack.
Eight seasons in St. Louis produced 54.5 sacks, an All-Pro selection in 2010, and a career-high 13 sacks in 2011. In 2010 he led the entire NFL in quarterback hurries with 41.5 and total quarterback disruptions with 67.5. The Rams went 7-8-1 that year. They finished below .500 in six of his eight seasons there. His individual production was consistently excellent; the team around him was not. That’s not a complaint – it’s the plain context.
He changed his jersey number from 72 to 91 before the 2011 season. Same number he wore at Virginia. On September 17, 2011, he and the Rams restructured his contract, freeing cap space while locking in a base salary over $10 million in 2012 and a $12.1 million signing bonus. October 30, 2011, he had a career-high three sacks in a single game against the Saints.
What’s strange about the Rams era, looking back, is how little national attention Long received despite the numbers. Pass rushers on winning teams generate far more coverage than pass rushers on four-win franchises, which is basically an unfair tax on individual excellence. He put up the production. The team record buried most of the coverage.
New England Patriots (2016) and Super Bowl LI
Long left St. Louis as a free agent after the 2015 season and signed with New England. One year with Bill Belichick’s defense. One Super Bowl ring.
Super Bowl LI on February 5, 2017, in Houston, is the game most people remember as the 28-3 comeback. The Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons by 25 points in the third quarter and won 34-28 in overtime. Long was part of a defense that held Atlanta scoreless over the final 31 minutes of regulation and all of overtime. He had been chasing a championship for eight years in St. Louis. He won it in his first season away.
His retirement announcement two years later specifically mentioned the highs and lows, and you can read the Rams years in that phrase without him having to spell it out.
Philadelphia Eagles (2017–2018) and Super Bowl LII
He signed with the Eagles on March 28, 2017 – his 32nd birthday. Super Bowl LII, February 4, 2018, the Eagles beat the Patriots 41-33. Long was one of six players in NFL history to win consecutive Super Bowls for two different teams. The other five include names like Deion Sanders and Jerry Rice, so the company is not modest.
His final season in 2018 was quieter statistically. He was 33 years old, working against increasingly younger offensive linemen, and the Eagles finished 9-7. On May 18, 2019, he posted a photo of his right hand holding a red cup against a backdrop of mountains and trees. “Cheers,” he wrote. “Been a hell of a journey.” That was it.
The 2017 Salary Donation and Walter Payton Award
During the 2017 season – the same year he won Super Bowl LII – Long donated his entire NFL game checks to educational causes. He directed the money to four cities where he had played: Charlottesville received funds for educational scholarships, as did Boston, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. The total came to approximately $1 million in direct charitable contributions from a single season’s earnings.
He appeared on Ellen on November 10, 2017, after the donations became public. He won the 2018 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award – the league’s highest honor for community service – and the NFLPA Alan Page Community Award the same year. The Walter Payton Award is voted on by a committee of former players, coaches, and team executives. Long received it while simultaneously playing for a Super Bowl. That combination – back-to-back championships plus the league’s top humanitarian honor across three consecutive years – has no real precedent in modern NFL history.
What genuinely surprises me about this story is the specific detail of Charlottesville. He grew up there, played high school ball there, and then specifically directed scholarship money back there during the same year the city became a national flashpoint over the August 2017 Unite the Right rally. He never made that connection explicitly in press interviews. The money was already committed and flowing. He just didn’t make it about himself.
The Chris Long Foundation and Waterboys
Long founded the Chris Long Foundation in May 2015. Its flagship program, Waterboys, grew directly from a 2013 climb of Mount Kilimanjaro, during which he witnessed both the landscape of Tanzania and the scale of its water scarcity problem. Waterboys recruits professional athletes and public figures to raise money for clean water infrastructure in East Africa, with WorldServe International as the implementation partner on the ground.
By 2023 the initiative had provided clean water access to over 500,000 people. The target is one million. A 2023 partnership with Well Aware, a nonprofit that builds permanent water systems in Africa, extended the program’s reach into Kenya. The foundation also runs education and veterans’ support programs domestically.
The model is straightforward: athletes bring platform and fundraising; technical organizations bring in-country expertise. Long has climbed Kilimanjaro multiple times for the initiative, bringing other NFL players including Jason Kelce, Steven Jackson, Rob Ninkovich, and Alejandro Villanueva, along with U.S. military veterans. The logistics of getting a group of retired 280-pound linemen to 19,341 feet are, apparently, non-trivial.
Green Light Podcast and Life After Retirement
The Green Light with Chris Long podcast launched in October 2019. Long co-hosts with Macon, a longtime collaborator, alongside former teammates Nate “Dr. Fax” Collins and Beau Allen. The format covers NFL analysis with genuine authority, sports gambling, music, pop culture, and interviews that range from Nikki Glaser to Matthew McConaughey to former players with things worth saying.
It is not a polished ESPN-style broadcast. The opinions are blunt, the tangents are real, and Long has enough credibility from actually having played on winning rosters that his football takes carry weight that most former-player commentary doesn’t. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and most other platforms. His social following sits around 575,000 on X (formerly Twitter) and roughly 400,000 on Instagram.
He also worked as an analyst on Inside the NFL on CBS, and has made various media appearances since retirement. The podcast, though, is the primary output – and it has found an audience that likely wouldn’t have found him through traditional broadcast work.
Personal Life
Long married Megan O’Malley on June 22, 2013. Megan was born on March 26, 1986, in Fairfax, Virginia, and grew up in Moorestown, New Jersey, where she captained her high school lacrosse team. Her father, Joe, played minor league baseball in the Braves organization. Her sister Katie played basketball at Johns Hopkins. They have three children together.
In interviews, Long has described Megan’s support as central to the foundation and philanthropy work – not in the performative way athletes sometimes acknowledge spouses in award speeches, but in the operational sense of someone who is involved in what the organization does.
Career Statistics and Awards
Across 162 regular-season games: 70 sacks, 332 total tackles, 15 forced fumbles, six fumble recoveries. His best single-season sack total was 13, in 2011. He appeared in 11 NFL seasons without a single Pro Bowl selection – which is either a testament to consistently mediocre team records suppressing his visibility, or a quirk of voting, or both. The career sack total puts him in the top 50 all time, though he is rarely mentioned in those conversations.
Awards: Ted Hendricks Award (2007), PFWA All-Rookie Team (2008), NFC Defensive Player of the Week (2010), NFL All-Pro (2010), Super Bowl LI Champion, Super Bowl LII Champion, NFLPA Alan Page Community Award (2018), Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year (2018). His number 91 is retired at the University of Virginia.
His estimated net worth is around $40 million, built from approximately $93 million in career NFL earnings including his $56.5 million rookie deal, subsequent contracts in New England and Philadelphia, media work, and endorsements. He donated roughly $1 million of his 2017 earnings, which means the “he gave away his whole salary” framing – while technically accurate to the game checks – overstates the financial sacrifice somewhat. It was still an unusual act. Most people don’t do it.
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