Andrew Whitworth – Left Tackle, Super Bowl Champion, Walter Payton Award Winner
Who Is Andrew Whitworth?
Andrew Whitworth retired in March 2022 as the oldest offensive tackle in NFL history – 40 years old, 16 seasons, one Super Bowl ring earned in his final game. He’s 6-foot-7, 330 pounds, played left tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals and then the Los Angeles Rams, and finished with 239 games played. Four Pro Bowls. Two first-team All-Pro selections. The Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year in 2021. He was also the first offensive lineman to win that award since Baltimore’s Matt Birk in 2011.
Born December 12, 1981, in Monroe, Louisiana, Whitworth grew up in West Monroe and played high school football for a program that won three Louisiana Class 5A State Championships while he was on the roster. He was also a tennis champion in the state. Not a lot of offensive linemen put “tennis champion” on the resume.
LSU, 52 Starts, and a BCS Title
Whitworth enrolled at LSU in 2001, sat out the first year as a redshirt, then started every game from 2002 onward. By the time he graduated, he had 52 career starts – second-most in NCAA Division I history at the time, behind Oklahoma’s Derrick Strait. His 2003 sophomore season ended with a BCS national championship after LSU beat Oklahoma 21–14 in the Sugar Bowl. He led the team with 1,008 snaps that year and was credited with 105 key blocks, including 82 knockdowns.
In 2005, his senior season, he finished without allowing a single sack over his final 22 straight games. The Peach Bowl that January, a 40–3 win over Miami, capped it. He earned first-team All-SEC honors his junior and senior years. Scouts at CNNSI.com ranked him the sixth-best offensive line prospect in the nation coming out. The Cincinnati Bengals took him in the second round – 55th overall – in the 2006 draft.
Eleven Years in Cincinnati – The Quiet Foundation
Whitworth’s first few seasons in Cincinnati were spent at left guard, not his natural position. The move that changed his career came in 2009, when head coach Marvin Lewis shifted him to left tackle. He started all 16 games that year, allowed just five sacks, and helped running back Cedric Benson rush for 1,251 yards. He made his first Pro Bowl that season.
Over the next seven years he made two more Pro Bowls with the Bengals, signed a four-year, $30 million extension in 2008, and became one of the steadiest left tackles in the AFC. In 2010, he caught a one-yard touchdown pass from Carson Palmer against the Steelers – one of those odd stats that shows up in career footnotes. By 2016, his contract had expired and the Bengals didn’t re-sign him. He was 35 years old. Most teams in the league would’ve agreed that part of the story was finished.
Signing With the Rams at 35 – What “Betting on Yourself” Actually Looks Like
The Rams signed Whitworth in March 2017 for three years and $33.75 million – real money for a player whose former team had just let him walk on age concerns. He has talked publicly about being told he was too old to keep playing at that level. He disagreed. In Los Angeles, under head coach Sean McVay, he became the anchor of an offensive line that protected Matthew Stafford through a Super Bowl run. He was named to the Pro Bowl in 2017 and 2020 with the Rams. He earned his second first-team All-Pro in 2017 at age 36.
What’s harder to quantify but equally real: his effect on the locker room. McVay, Stafford, Cooper Kupp – all of them have said versions of the same thing in press conferences, that Whitworth set a standard for how to prepare and how to compete. He was 10 to 15 years older than most of the players around him and the one they looked to.
Knee Injury, Final Two Games, Super Bowl LVI
During the Rams’ Wild Card win over Arizona in January 2022, Whitworth injured his knee. He missed the divisional round win over Tampa Bay. Then he came back, started the NFC Championship Game against the 49ers, started Super Bowl LVI against the Bengals – his original team – and won. He was 40 years, 56 days old on Super Bowl Sunday, February 13, 2022. The oldest starting offensive lineman in Super Bowl history, playing his former franchise, on the biggest stage in the sport, with a knee that had been injured three weeks earlier.
The Rams won 23–20. Whitworth announced his retirement six weeks later. His final NFL game was a Super Bowl win. That’s not a common ending.
Career Numbers
239 games played across 16 seasons. 235 starts. Four Pro Bowls (2009, 2011, 2012 with Cincinnati; 2017 with Los Angeles). Two first-team All-Pro selections (2015, 2017). One Super Bowl championship. He retired as both the oldest offensive tackle in NFL history and the oldest offensive lineman to win a Super Bowl. Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value metric gives him a career weighted AV that places him among the top offensive tackles of his era – not a fringe Hall of Fame discussion, a legitimate one.
One thing worth noting about those numbers: the Pro Bowl selections cluster at the beginning and end of his career, which is unusual. Most players peak in the middle. Whitworth’s 2017 season with the Rams, at age 35–36, was by many measures his best professional year – which is genuinely strange for a position that requires the kind of physical durability that typically erodes with age.
Walter Payton Man of the Year – What He Actually Did
The Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award has existed since 1970. It goes to one player per year who demonstrates both on-field excellence and community impact. Whitworth won it for 2021, announced at NFL Honors on February 10, 2022 – four days before Super Bowl LVI. He was the first Rams player ever to win the award. The $250,000 donation that comes with the honor went to a sports field refurbishment project at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Los Angeles Challengers Clubhouse, which serves more than 150 kids a day and is the only track and field facility in that community.
His six-minute acceptance speech is worth watching, not just reading about. He told a story from a 2021 game against the Detroit Lions, when a player approached him on the field after the game. Derrick Barnes, a Lions linebacker, told Whitworth he didn’t expect him to remember – but that Whitworth had once spent time with him at a Boys and Girls Club in Cincinnati when Barnes was a kid. Whitworth was floored. Barnes was 22 years old when they played each other. The math puts the Boys and Girls Club visit somewhere between 2007 and 2017, meaning Whitworth had been doing that work for well over a decade before anyone gave him an award for it.
He used most of the speech to push other players toward more action, not just social media awareness. “We have more work to do,” he said. “We need more action.” Coming from someone who had just been named the league’s top community servant, the message landed differently than it would from anyone else.
The Big Whit 77 Foundation – Programs and Scale
Whitworth and his wife Melissa started the Big Whit 77 Foundation in 2008, two years after he was drafted. The foundation operates across two geographies – Louisiana, where he grew up, and California, where he played the last five years of his career.
Whit’s Warriors, the foundation’s scholarship program, has awarded $400,000 in scholarships and school supplies to Louisiana high school seniors. The foundation has also funded STEAM labs at low-income elementary and middle schools to close the technology gap for students who don’t have access otherwise. In 2017, Whitworth bought bikes and helmets for all 600 students at Grape Street Elementary in Watts. During COVID-19 in March 2020, he donated $250,000 to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. After the Borderline Bar and Grill mass shooting in Thousand Oaks in November 2018, he donated an entire game check to the families of the victims the next morning, then auctioned his game-worn jersey to raise additional funds. He also created the Big Whit Homes for L.A. Families program in 2021 – pledging $20,000 after every home Rams game to repair homes in Louisiana and move Angelenos facing housing insecurity into stable housing.
Those are specific numbers attached to specific programs, not a vague “commitment to giving back.” The foundation has an adoption assistance component as well, providing financial help to local families pursuing adoption. Melissa Whitworth co-leads the operation. She’s described the work as rooted in being embraced by communities that helped them early and wanting to return that to others – which is a different framing than most athlete charity missions, and a more honest one.
The Hall of Fame Question
Here’s the honest assessment: Whitworth should be in the Hall of Fame, and the obstacle isn’t his resume – it’s the position. Offensive linemen face a structurally harder path to Canton than skill position players. Their contributions don’t produce countable touchdowns or receiving yards. Voters look at Pro Bowl appearances and All-Pro selections because those are the available proxies, and by those measures Whitworth’s four Pro Bowls and two first-team All-Pros are real but not overwhelming. Compare: Orlando Pace, a Hall of Famer who spent most of his career with the Rams, made six Pro Bowls and three first-team All-Pros. Joe Thomas, another lock, made ten Pro Bowls and eight first-team All-Pros.
What complicates the comparison is that Whitworth’s career had a strange arc. His late peak with the Rams from 2017 to 2021, at ages 35–40, was arguably his best football. Voters tend to weight prime years more heavily than late-career excellence, which may work against him even though the late-career excellence was legitimate. He won a Super Bowl. He was the Walter Payton Man of the Year. He retired as the oldest tackle in NFL history. Whether that totality clears the threshold is a voting question, not a football question – and the voting record on offensive linemen suggests the threshold is set higher than it ought to be. His name will appear on the ballot. What happens after that is harder to predict.
After the Game – Broadcasting and Speaking
Whitworth and cornerback Aqib Talib joined Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football as contributors for pregame, halftime, and postgame coverage after retiring. He’s represented by the Harry Walker Agency as a keynote speaker on the subjects of perseverance and leadership – the practical kind, built from overcoming age bias and proving skeptics wrong over a 16-year career. His speaking material draws directly from his NFL experience: the 2017 signing when he was considered done, the 2021 season at 40, the knee injury in January and the return three weeks later for the Super Bowl. There’s a ready-made arc there and he uses it.
He’s also remained involved in the Los Angeles community through the Foundation, including the $250,000 field refurbishment at the Challengers Clubhouse in 2022, done in partnership with Cedars-Sinai and Bridgestone. The Boys and Girls Club received new athletic facilities, and the Rams hosted a free football clinic there for more than 100 local youth. That particular project was funded directly from his Walter Payton Award prize money – he didn’t keep it.
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