Bryce Huff Walked Away From Millions at 27 – Here’s the Full Story
Mobile, Alabama to Memphis to the NFL’s Bottom of the Roster
St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Mobile puts out football players. Bryce Huff was one of them – first-team All-State as a senior, 93 tackles, 7 sacks, the kind of résumé that gets attention from mid-major programs. He got offers from Arkansas State, Georgia Southern, and Troy. He committed to South Alabama first, then flipped to Memphis. Two-star recruit. Nobody’s top prospect.
At Memphis he grew into a pass-rush threat nobody in the 2020 draft class quite knew what to do with. Junior year: 9.5 sacks, 49 tackles, second-team All-American Athletic Conference. Senior year: 6.5 sacks, 15.5 tackles for loss, All-AAC again. Productive. Consistent. Still went undrafted.
He majored in Interdisciplinary Studies. That detail will matter later.
Four Years With the Jets: The Education Nobody Televised
The Jets signed him May 6, 2020, days after the draft closed. He made the 53-man roster, which itself isn’t guaranteed for undrafted guys, and debuted September 27 against the Colts. Two weeks later he got his first career sack on Ryan Fitzpatrick in a 24-0 loss to the Dolphins – one of those games where the sack is the only highlight.
2021 started with him as a nominal starter at linebacker. Six games in, a back injury ended it. IR. Then 2022 came and went without a breakout moment. Three and a half years in and his career sack total sat at 7.5 across 46 games. Passable for a rotational player. Nothing that justifies the contract he’d eventually sign.
Then 2023 happened. Ten sacks. Twenty-one quarterback hits. Twenty-nine tackles. Under Robert Saleh, who was running the Jets as head coach, Huff became the team’s most dangerous pass rusher on obvious passing downs. That season earned him restricted free agent status, a second-round tender from the Jets, and eventually a bidding war he won by a historic margin.
The Contract That Made History – and Then Didn’t Work
March 2024. The Eagles needed a pass rusher after trading Haason Reddick – who had 11 sacks – to the Jets. Philadelphia signed Huff to three years, $51.1 million, with $34 million guaranteed. Largest contract ever given to an undrafted non-quarterback in NFL history. The number was real.
The season wasn’t.
Vic Fangio’s defense in Philadelphia ran a different set of demands than what Saleh built in New York. Fangio wanted every-down versatility. Huff was a snap-count specialist, elite in a phone booth on third-and-seven, less useful setting the edge on first-and-ten. He finished 2024 with 2.5 sacks. A torn groin ligament put him on injured reserve in November. He came back December 28, played two games, then watched Super Bowl LIX from the sideline as a healthy scratch when Brandon Graham returned from IR.
The Eagles won 40-22 over the Chiefs. Huff has a ring. He didn’t play a snap in the game, which is worth saying plainly rather than burying it.
NFL Network’s Judy Battista called the Eagles’ decision to trade him afterward a “rare miss” by general manager Howie Roseman. The return: a conditional fifth-round pick that became the 166th overall selection, used by the Chicago Bears on Keyshaun Elliott. For context, the Eagles had paid Huff $34 million guaranteed.
San Francisco: One Last Season, One Clear Exit
The 49ers trade brought Huff back to Robert Saleh, now the team’s defensive coordinator. Reunions like this sometimes work and sometimes just delay the inevitable – this one worked, though not at the level either side probably hoped for.
Fifteen games. Four sacks. Two forced fumbles. Thirty tackles. His PFF pass-rush grade of 74.3 ranked 27th among 115 qualified edge defenders, and his 45 total pressures showed up in ways the sack column didn’t. He got to Matthew Stafford for an 11-yard loss. He strip-sacked Spencer Rattler on the final play of a Saints game. He played next to Nick Bosa and held his own in a defensive line that finished the regular season with only 20 total sacks – a number that reveals how much the rest of the unit was struggling, not how little Huff contributed.
The 49ers reached the playoffs. Then, on March 12, 2026, Huff posted a video to Instagram. He was 27. He was under contract for one more year at roughly $17 million. He retired anyway.
Why He Actually Left
The retirement video didn’t come out of nowhere, even if it felt that way. Huff told Ian Rapoport on NFL Network that he and his brother Jordan had been building their company for two and a half years – meaning they started while he was still in the middle of his Jets contract, before anyone knew he’d sign with Philadelphia, before the Super Bowl, before any of it.
The Eagles year is where his thinking shifted. He said as much. Sitting on injured reserve, later watching the Super Bowl from the bench, he started evaluating what he actually wanted. That’s his account of it, and there’s no reason to read it as spin – the Naberstone paper trail supports the timeline he described.
In the retirement video, he said he’d been playing football since he was four years old. Then: “At 27 years old, I know I’m capable of giving the world more than just football.”
He told Rapoport he was at peace with walking away. NFL careers average three years. Huff got six, $40.5 million, a championship, and a second-act business that had already built momentum before he left. The math, from his side of it, is harder to argue with than the initial reaction suggests.
Naberstone: The Problem He’s Trying to Solve
Lithium-ion batteries burn differently than wood or paper or gasoline. Conventional fire suppression – water, foam, CO2 systems – wasn’t designed for them. A lithium battery fire can reignite hours after it appears extinguished. The thermal runaway process generates its own oxygen, which means you can’t simply smother it. As EVs, e-bikes, and grid-scale battery storage have proliferated, the fires have followed. In 2023 alone, lithium battery fires killed dozens of people in New York City, mostly in apartment buildings where residents had charged e-bikes in hallways.
That’s the problem Naberstone is building toward. The company’s stated mission is safety infrastructure specifically designed for lithium-ion fire risk – not retrofitting existing systems, but building for the actual chemistry of the threat. Huff co-founded it with his brother Jordan. Naberstone’s Instagram, under the handle @naberstone, already showed Huff working alongside Jordan before the retirement was public.
When Rapoport asked whether Huff could have kept playing and grown the company simultaneously, Huff acknowledged he probably could have. He chose not to. “The best thing for both,” he said, was full commitment to the startup. The perseverance the game taught him – his word, not a paraphrase – was what he planned to bring to the company. Getting better one percent every day. Continuing to network. Learning the tech.
He was 27. He had $40.5 million and six years of professional football behind him. Naberstone was two and a half years into its development. The decision, framed that way, reads less like quitting and more like a scheduled handoff he’d been planning while everyone else was focused on his sack totals.
The Career Numbers, Without Inflating Them
Eighty-one games. Twenty-one starts. Twenty-four career sacks. Twenty-six tackles for loss. Sixty-two quarterback hits. One Super Bowl ring. Those are the numbers.
The 10-sack season in 2023 is the number that earned him the contract, and it’s also the one that makes the Eagles year look worse than it might have been under different circumstances. His 2.5 sacks with Philadelphia came in 10 games before the groin injury ended things – annualized, that’s roughly 4 sacks over a full season. Comparable to what he did with the 49ers in 2025. The Eagles year was bad, but Fangio’s scheme was genuinely not designed for what Huff does, and the injury removed any chance of proving it otherwise.
PFF had him at a 74.3 pass-rush grade in 2025. For context, that ranked 27th among 115 qualified edge defenders. He was generating pressure. The sacks just weren’t converting at the same rate they had in 2023, which is partly volume (the 49ers’ whole defense was struggling to finish) and partly the nature of snap-count specialization – he was dominant in a narrow role, which is a real skill with a real ceiling.
One number stands apart from all of them: the $51.1 million Eagles contract was the largest ever given to an undrafted non-quarterback in NFL history. That happened because of a single spectacular season at the end of a four-year apprenticeship most teams wouldn’t have offered. He went from two-star recruit to historically paid defender. That arc doesn’t require any additional significance attached to it.
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