Who Is Nate Jackson? The Denver Bronco Who Caught 27 Passes and Changed How We Think About the NFL
27 career receptions. Zero Pro Bowls. One New York Times bestseller. The math on Nate Jackson’s NFL career doesn’t add up the way you’d expect – and that’s exactly the point.
Jackson spent six seasons with the Denver Broncos between 2003 and 2008, bouncing between the practice squad and the active roster, switching positions mid-career, getting shipped to Germany for a spring of minor-league football, and quietly absorbing enough material to write the most brutally honest book anyone has ever published about life in the NFL. He wasn’t a star. He was a survivor. And it turns out survivors see things stars never do.
From a 500-Student College to the Mile High City
Jackson grew up in San Jose, California, the son of two schoolteachers. At Pioneer High School he was a multi-sport athlete. At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he got cut from the football program – a school that rarely produces NFL players to begin with. He transferred to Menlo College, a Division III school on California’s Central Coast with roughly 500 students enrolled at the time. He set records there as a wide receiver, was named first-team All-American every season he played, and won the NCAA Division III Offensive Player of the Year award after his senior year in 2001.
Nobody drafted him in 2002. The San Francisco 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent, largely on the recommendation of Bill Walsh’s son, who was the athletic director at Menlo College. Walsh’s endorsement got him through the door. A shoulder injury during training camp got him shown back out of it. The 49ers cut him, re-signed him at season’s end, then in August 2003 traded him to the Broncos – mid-training camp, with his 49ers uniform still on. He had three hours until his flight to Denver.
That’s not a detail from his memoir. That’s his actual life. One afternoon he was a 49er in California, where he’d spent all 23 years of his existence. A few hours later he was a Bronco. Jackson would later write about that moment with the clarity of someone who had processed it many times: when you choose a life in football, you cede the right to choose much else.
Six Seasons With the Broncos – What the Stats Don’t Show
Jackson spent 2003 mostly on the practice squad, appearing in his first NFL regular-season game on December 28 of that year. The Broncos sent him to NFL Europe in the spring of 2004, where he played for the Rhein Fire in Germany. He came back that fall and caught 8 passes for 73 yards while also recording 7 special teams tackles – unglamorous work, but it kept him employed.
Before the 2005 season, the Broncos converted him from wide receiver to tight end. That position switch is worth pausing on. It wasn’t a promotion. It was a calculation: he was undersized for a receiver and had enough blocking ability to make himself useful somewhere else on the roster. He adapted, because fringe players adapt or they disappear. Jackson adapted.
His best season came in 2008: 11 receptions, 84 yards, one touchdown – career highs across the board. He made his first career start that year. Then in November the Broncos placed him on injured reserve. In January 2009, the team hired Josh McDaniels as head coach. In February, Jackson was released. He found out via a voicemail left on his parents’ landline in California. He called McDaniels for an explanation. McDaniels’ assistant said he’d call back. He never did.
His career numbers: 41 games played over six years, 27 receptions, 240 receiving yards. For context, the average NFL career lasts about 3.3 years. Jackson lasted six. By the standards of his position on the roster, that’s a long run.
After Denver cut him, he signed with the Cleveland Browns before the 2009 season, got released before it started, then signed with the Las Vegas Locomotives of the United Football League. He tore a hamstring in training camp and never played a game. That was it. Football was over.
Slow Getting Up – The NFL Memoir That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist
HarperCollins published Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile on September 17, 2013. It became a New York Times bestseller. Reviewers reached for superlatives they don’t normally apply to sports books.
The New York Times called Jackson “a unicorn-like rarity among former football players: He can write.” Dwight Garner’s review described the book as “everything you want football memoirs to be but never are: hilarious, dirty, warm, human, honest, weird.” Tom Junod compared it to Ball Four – the Jim Bouton baseball memoir from 1970 that the MLB establishment hated precisely because it told the truth. Esquire called Jackson “funny as hell, page-after-page funny.”
What makes the book unusual isn’t the writing, though the writing is genuinely good. It’s the subject. Jackson wasn’t writing about winning a Super Bowl or making a Pro Bowl or managing fame and money. He was writing about the hundreds of players whose names don’t appear on any highlight reel – the practice squad guys, the bubble players, the men who spend six days a week preparing for a game they may not dress for on Sunday. As he put it himself, an NFL team isn’t built to depend on one man. It runs on a system. The men are temporary. The plan is permanent.
Kirkus gave it a starred review, noting that Jackson’s greatest strength is self-awareness: “Every time one of his stories seems to be veering toward stereotypical athlete bluster, he takes an ironic swerve, usually making himself the butt of his own acerbic wit.” That’s accurate. He writes about paying a $26,000 dinner tab for established veterans like Clinton Portis because that’s what rookies did. He writes about impersonating Randy Moss for Denver’s starting defense before a game against the Vikings. He writes about using his player credentials to buy Super Bowl tickets just to scalp them. None of it is heroic. All of it is honest.
The book covers scouting combines and training camps, game-day rituals and off-season parties, injuries described with clinical detail pulled directly from his medical records – including a groin tear so severe he documented it in terms that are both medically accurate and deeply undignified. He also writes about the death of Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams, shot and killed after a losing game in December 2006, and what grief moves through a locker room full of men who aren’t allowed to fall apart.
One passage that reviewers consistently pulled out comes late in the book, as Jackson’s Broncos tenure was ending. He writes about the organization as a machine that discards parts as needed, and about how even franchise quarterbacks – he was watching Jake Plummer get pushed out in favor of Jay Cutler – eventually face the same truth: someday the quarterback gets thrown out with the trash too. “Eventually the lie reveals itself to everyone.” That sentence lands harder than most things written about the NFL in the past decade.
Goodreads readers who had no particular allegiance to the Broncos or to football gave it four and five stars because the book isn’t really about football. It’s about a workplace – brutal, hierarchical, temporary – and the men who pass through it. Readers who described themselves as non-sports fans found it absorbing. That crossover is rare for a sports memoir and speaks to how Jackson framed his subject.
Fantasy Man and What Came After the Memoir
In September 2016, Jackson published his second book: Fantasy Man: A Former NFL Player’s Descent into the Brutality of Fantasy Football. It follows a season managing his fantasy team, the Bunny Sleeves, while pulling back to examine the multibillion-dollar fantasy sports industry, the disconnect between players as human beings and players as statistical units to be optimized by strangers, and the NFL’s ongoing cannabis policy – which Jackson couldn’t stop writing about no matter the format.
The book didn’t hit the same cultural nerve as Slow Getting Up, which is the honest way to say it. A debut memoir from a fringe NFL player with a genuine literary voice is an event. A follow-up about fantasy football is a trickier sell, even a sharp one.
His writing career had been building since 2010, when he started freelancing for Deadspin, Slate, the Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. In July 2020, Bonneville Denver hired him as a contributor and fill-in host at Sports Radio 104.3 The Fan. He worked there through 2023, when a station restructuring ended his run. Since then he has been working with Guerilla Sports, a Denver-based digital media company, hosting a podcast called Dumb Jock and doing on-camera work covering the Broncos.
In the summer of 2024, he took on a new role: NFL sideline uniform inspector for Denver Broncos games, replacing Hall of Famer Randy Gradishar, who retired from the position after his enshrinement in Canton. Jackson’s response to the appointment was characteristically dry. “The logical next progression is to await my call from Canton,” he said. “If I’m following in Randy’s footsteps, I won’t be surprised if that comes next.”
Cannabis, Painkillers, and the Argument He Won’t Stop Making
Jackson has been publicly arguing for cannabis as a pain management tool for NFL players since at least 2013, and the argument is more specific than the headline usually suggests. He’s not saying players should be allowed to get high. He’s saying the NFL actively steered injured players toward opioids – Percocet, Toradol, injections administered on the sideline with minimal documentation – while suspending players who used a substance with clinical evidence of pain-relieving and neuroprotective properties.
During his career, Jackson used cannabis as an alternative to opioid painkillers. He sought to avoid opioids as much as possible, a decision that looks less like counterculture and more like self-preservation given what we now know about painkiller dependency rates in retired NFL players. He’s spoken about this on the New York Times opinion page, CBS This Morning, and in an HBO Real Sports segment examining cannabis use across the league.
The specific complication Jackson raises is worth stating plainly: the U.S. government holds a patent – Patent No. 6,630,507, filed in 1999 and granted in 2003 – on the use of cannabinoids as neuroprotectants, specifically for protecting brain tissue from damage caused by strokes and traumatic injury. The same federal government schedules cannabis as a Schedule I substance with no accepted medical use. Jackson has pointed to this contradiction in multiple forums. It is a real contradiction, not a rhetorical flourish.
He is a board member of Athletes for Care, an organization that advocates for athlete health and safety including cannabis access. Through that group he co-hosts a podcast called Caveman Poet Society with former NFL lineman Eben Britton. He is also a member of the Gridiron Cannabis Coalition, which specifically pressures the NFL to revise its drug policy.
In February 2024, he published a piece in Defector admitting he had used human growth hormone to recover from an injury after leaving the Broncos. The disclosure is consistent with how he has always operated – name the thing, explain the context, let readers decide what to make of it. He is not the kind of former athlete who manages his image. That quality made Slow Getting Up what it is, and it makes his advocacy credible in a way that a cleaner public persona would undercut.
Six Seasons That Didn’t End When He Left the Field
Jackson arrived in Denver in August 2003 with no guaranteed contract, no established role, and no particular reason to believe he would still be there in 2004. He survived six seasons under Mike Shanahan, navigated a position change, spent a spring playing for a team in Germany, watched two quarterbacks get run out of town, and got cut via voicemail by a coach who never returned his call.
He then wrote a book that the NFL establishment would probably have preferred he didn’t write, spent the next decade building a second career in media and advocacy, and has spent years making a public health argument that the league is only now beginning to take seriously. The NFL softened its cannabis testing threshold from 15 nanograms to 35 during CBA negotiations – a change Jackson was publicly pushing for. It’s not everything he argued for, but the direction is his.
There’s a version of this story where Nate Jackson is a footnote: 41 games, 27 catches, out of the league at 29. That version exists in the Pro Football Reference database, accurate and complete. There’s also the version where a man who couldn’t crack a Division I college roster ended up writing the most important book about professional football published in the last thirty years, doing it under his own name, without a ghostwriter, without softening anything that might embarrass someone who still has power over him.
Both versions are true. The second one is more interesting.
Comments