Carl Nassib: The NFL Career, the Announcement That Changed Sports, and What Came Next
Two weeks before the 2021 NFL season opener, Carl Nassib was sitting on a secret he’d been carrying for years. On June 21 – Pride Month – he posted a short video to Instagram from what looked like his backyard, wearing a plain t-shirt, and said it plainly: “I just want to take a quick moment to say that I’m gay.” No press conference. No ghostwritten statement. Just him, a phone, and thirty-three words that made him the first active NFL player in the league’s 102-year history to come out publicly. By the end of that day, his jersey was the top seller across all of Fanatics.
He grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in a football family that took the sport seriously without treating it as the only thing. His father Gilbert played college ball at the University of Delaware. His older brother Ryan was a quarterback at Syracuse, got drafted by the Giants in the fourth round in 2013, and spent time with several NFL teams. Carl was the youngest of five kids, and in a family with 44 cousins – his count, not an approximation – there was exactly one person who was openly gay. His uncle. That detail matters more than it seems at first.
At Malvern Preparatory School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, Carl lettered three years in football, twice in basketball, three times in track and field. He was an offensive tackle and defensive end. When it came time for college, he enrolled at Penn State without a scholarship. Walk-on. No guarantee of playing time, no guarantee of anything. He graduated in December 2015 with a biology degree and had been planning on medical school until football intervened in a way that made medical school an afterthought.
His senior season at Penn State is still one of the more remarkable single-year performances in recent Big Ten history. He won the Hendricks Award, given to the nation’s best defensive end. He won the Lombardi Award for the top college lineman or linebacker in the country. He was named the Big Ten’s Nagurski-Woodson Defensive Player of the Year. He was a unanimous All-American. He was a finalist for the Bronko Nagurski Trophy and the Burlsworth Trophy – the latter given to the best player who started their career as a walk-on, which felt almost designed for him. The Cleveland Browns took him 65th overall in the 2016 draft, third round. In his first professional game, against the Eagles, he recorded a sack, three tackles, and a deflected pass, and got nominated for Pepsi NFL Rookie of the Week.
The next seven years were not a straight line. Cleveland for two seasons, Tampa Bay for two, Las Vegas on a three-year $25 million contract (with $16.75 million guaranteed, signed March 2020), then back to Tampa. He was waived in Cleveland, picked up by the Buccaneers, waived again, picked up again. In 2019 the Bucs named him a team captain. His coordinator Rod Marinelli got him his best sack numbers in Las Vegas. During the Raiders’ 2020 Week 10 win over Denver, he picked off Drew Lock – his only career interception. He finished his career with 25.5 sacks, 187 combined tackles, 59 quarterback hits, and four forced fumbles across 99 games.
The numbers justify a $25 million contract. They don’t explain why his jersey sold out in a single afternoon in June 2021, or why the Smithsonian called.
The coming out announcement was three years in the making, by Nassib’s own account. He’d been out to his immediate family and close friends for a while. The public announcement was something else. What finally pushed him toward it was a visit to his uncle, the one openly gay person in the extended family, who was dying of cancer. Nassib left the Buccaneers briefly to see him. He came out to his uncle during that visit – the first time he’d said it to anyone outside his tight inner circle. His uncle’s response: “This is the biggest weight off my chest. I’m not the only one.” Nassib has said that moment clarified everything. If a dying man in a family of 44 felt alone – he could change that for someone, somewhere, if he went public. He donated $100,000 to The Trevor Project the same day he made his announcement. The NFL matched it.
The response from around the league was loud and immediate. Roger Goodell put out a statement. Mark Davis praised his courage. Penn State released a statement. Saquon Barkley, his former teammate, posted his support. What didn’t happen – and this is the part Nassib didn’t fully expect – was any meaningful backlash from inside locker rooms. He’d been carrying this thing partly out of fear of that reaction. It didn’t come. He told Ryan Clark and Channing Crowder on The Pivot podcast in 2025 about a moment in Cleveland years earlier when he dropped the phrase “gay ass bootlegs” in the huddle – a throwaway line – and five offensive linemen immediately corrected him. He remembers thinking: “The league is ready for this. We’ve got allies here.”
Three months after the announcement, on September 13, 2021, the Raiders opened the season on Monday Night Football against the Baltimore Ravens. In overtime, with the game tied, Nassib strip-sacked Lamar Jackson. Las Vegas recovered the fumble and drove for the winning touchdown. Final score: 33-27. He became, in that play, the first openly gay player in NFL history to appear in a regular-season game. He was also the first to win. “That’s sick, that’s f*cking cool,” he told Out magazine later. On January 15, 2022, he became the first openly gay player to appear in an NFL playoff game.
His No. 94 Raiders jersey – the one he wore that September night against Baltimore – is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., in the “Entertainment Nation” exhibit. It went up in May 2024. Nassib told the Washington Post it was “really important that gay stories get told and remembered.” The jersey sat in storage for three years before anyone thought to ask what should be done with it. That gap is harder to square with the magnitude of the moment, though the Smithsonian’s collection process moves slowly by design.
He retired in September 2023. The Instagram post announcing it opened: “This is a bittersweet moment for me but after seven seasons and just over 100 NFL games I am officially retiring from football to focus on my company Rayze.” He told People he felt “physically and mentally fit” – the retirement wasn’t injury-driven. He’d been building Rayze since just before his final season and felt he couldn’t do both anymore.
Rayze is a tech platform built to connect volunteers and donors with nonprofits. The pitch is simple: the infrastructure for giving back is broken. Younger people want to contribute but the discovery process for finding organizations is fragmented. Nassib’s argument is that the same social mechanics that drive engagement on consumer apps haven’t been applied to philanthropy. Partners so far include the United Way, The Trevor Project, and (RED). He’s been explicit that the money he made in football means he doesn’t need Rayze to generate personal income. “I got into this business to empower nonprofits,” he told The Advocate in 2024. “That makes me really happy because I just love them so much.” In November 2024 he sat down with Goldman Sachs senior advisor Susie Scher for a Talks at GS conversation about modernizing the philanthropy industry – not the usual post-NFL media circuit.
In July 2024 he was elected to Penn State’s Board of Trustees by the Alumni constituency, effective July 1. The university bio lists him as “Founder and CEO, Rayze Inc.” first, before the football career. He serves on the United Way of Chester County board. He’s been in a relationship with Danish Olympian Søren Dahl since at least 2023.
Before Nassib, Michael Sam came out publicly in 2014, was drafted by the Rams in the seventh round, made a sack on national television during the preseason, and was cut before the regular season started. He never played in a regular-season NFL game. Jason Collins came out in 2013 while on the Wizards roster, making him the first openly gay active player in any of the four major North American pro sports leagues – but basketball and football operate on very different cultural frequencies, and the NFL’s reach is categorically larger. What Nassib changed was visibility at scale: a defensive end, playing for a nationally televised franchise, making the game-winning play in overtime on a Monday night with 15 million people watching. Young athletes – football players, soccer players, kids in sports with no openly gay professionals at all – have been contacting Nassib’s family ever since. Not occasionally. Regularly. His brother Ryan told him about parents calling to say the Instagram video was the reason their kid felt safe enough to come out.
His career stats – 25.5 sacks, 187 tackles, 59 QB hits – are the stats of a solid rotational pass rusher who held starting jobs, earned a $25 million contract on merit, and played 99 games without washing out. They are not Hall of Fame numbers. Nobody is making that argument. What they show is that his historic announcement wasn’t made from a position of desperation or publicity-seeking. He was an employed, contributing NFL player with a guaranteed contract when he posted that video. That context is what makes the moment different from Sam’s, and why the reaction inside the league landed the way it did.
He told CBS News after announcing his retirement: “It’s sad. I feel like someone’s dying. Like I feel like this whole big part of my life is over, but now I get to move on to this next big beautiful chapter.” He was 30. He’d started as a walk-on with a biology degree and a plan for medical school, spent seven years in the NFL, changed the league in a way no statistic captures, and left on his own terms to build software for nonprofits. The uncle who was dying of cancer when Carl came out to him privately – he lived long enough to see the public announcement.
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