In case you missed it, Ndamukong Suh recently decided to retire after 13 seasons in the NFL. He goes out having played for five different teams and winning one Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Suh was also the Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2010 and made three First-Team All-Pro selections. All in all, he has solid statistics, but not a shiny enough resume to make it into the Hall of Fame.
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Perhaps the saddest part about Suh’s retirement is the circumstances. It comes one year after the death of his father, and he revealed in a recent Twitter post that it was his dad’s dying wish for him to let the game go.
“You’ve done everything you set out to do. Now it’s time for the next chapter,” Suh’s father told him.
Suh penned much more in the emotional post and included photos of his father along with it. It’s never easy losing a parent, especially when they’ve been such a big figure in your life. Suh made it sound like his dad was the anchor that held his life in place.
July 12, 2024 was the hardest day of my life.
It’s the day I said goodbye to my father, the man who raised me, shaped me, challenged me, and believed in me before I believed in myself.
He wasn’t just a dad. He was my idol, my coach, and my anchor.
He taught me what it meant to… pic.twitter.com/WkefQaDrsQ— Ndamukong Suh (@NdamukongSuh) July 12, 2025
In light of the retirement news, Shannon Sharpe and Chad Johnson decided to look back on Suh’s career. They both had a lot of respect for the resume Suh put together in the NFL. Johnson called the tackle dominant, while also recognizing that he was highly criticized by some.
“He was a dominant force, Unc. He had some hiccups, you know,” Johnson said on Nightcap before bursting out into laughter. “He had some hiccups on the field. We all have. They tried to coin him as a dirty player. He brought it on himself a little bit.”
Suh definitely had a reputation for crossing the line at times during his career. He was known for taking cheap shots when officials weren’t looking, with the most infamous being when he stepped on Aaron Rodgers’ ankle after a play in the fourth quarter. Incidents like this stuck with Suh for a majority of his career.
Regardless, Sharpe commended Suh as a dominant force, while saying that his play got overshadowed by his behavior on the field.
“He wasn’t the cleanest player,” Sharpe said. “And I think, Ocho, you’re right. Because he was a dominant player, but I think his play got overshadowed by some of his antics.”
Sharpe was being too nice with his assessment. Suh will be remembered as one of the dirtiest players in NFL history. LeGarrett Blount once said that there was no place in the game for him. From his rookie year through 2018, Suh racked up nearly $350k in fines for illegal hits and on-field infractions.
However, that doesn’t mean that Suh was bad at what he did. In fact, like Sharpe and Johnson said, he was a dominant force on the field. Offenses feared him. And he was unapologetic about who he was, which made teams fear him even more.
Football is a violent sport that breeds intense personalities. Suh fit right into that mold, often being rewarded for his aggressiveness. But he also crossed the line at times, doing things that felt more like the NFL of the 1970s. It was a fine line he walked, and critics will surely hold that against him when casting Hall of Fame votes.
We tend to believe Suh will come up short of being enshrined in Canton. He had a fast start to his career, but his peak was simply too short from 2012 to 2016. The dip in production at the end of his career could hinder his chances.
But who knows, maybe the voters will look at the stats he compiled and decide that Suh deserves to be remembered as an old-school player in a modern-day era.
