For the second straight year since he became eligible, Terrell Suggs is a semifinalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A Baltimore Ravens legend, some forget that he also had a very short yet successful stint with the Kansas City Chiefs in 2019.
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Suggs is a Defensive Rookie (2003) and Defensive Player (2011) of the Year, a seven-time Pro Bowler, and the NFL’s all-time leader in tackles for loss (202). He’s also No. 12 on the all-time sack list, with 139.0. He’d have ended up in Canton even without winning a championship. But he won two.
The second one came in his final NFL season, in 2019. He had departed his beloved Ravens in 2018 and landed with a floundering Arizona Cardinals team, one year later. After the Cardinals were eliminated from playoff contention (they were 5-10-1 that year), he figured, “If I don’t make it to Baltimore, I’ll just retire. I’ll ride off into the sunset.” But then, as Suggs recently recounted, he got a fortuitous call from one of the great coaches in NFL history.
“But Andy Reid called me. He didn’t even call my agent! I don’t know how he got my number till this day,” Suggs recalled on the Get Got Pod.
“He was like, ‘Sizzle, I know you love Baltimore, but you’ve gotta understand, I gave Harb (John Harbaugh) his first coaching job. Everything you love about Harbs, he got from me. You come with me, you’ll win a Super Bowl,” he added.
John Harbaugh had coached Suggs, nicknamed ‘Sizzle’, for 11 of his 16 years with the Ravens. And Reid had given Harbaugh his NFL start in 1998 as his special teams coordinator with the Philadelphia Eagles, a position he held until 2006. Harbaugh was Reid’s defensive backs coach in 2007, the year before he was hired to be the Ravens’ head coach in 2008.
Reid made a compelling case with the Harbaugh connection. But it wasn’t enough to make Suggs agree to come to Kansas City. He asked the coach to let him sleep on it. But as soon as he hung up the phone, he got a call from another, more convincing Kansas City Chiefs representative.
“Patrick Mahomes calls me. He’s like, ‘Sizzle, come get this Super Bowl ring.’ I was like, ‘I’ll be there in the morning.’ … I was like, that’s definitely how I wanna go out.”
Suggs did join the Chiefs, and in the end, Suggs did “come get this Super Bowl ring” as Kansas City won Super Bowl 54 to cap off the 2019 season, which would be Sizzle’s last in the NFL.
He didn’t do a whole lot with the Chiefs, though. He had one sack and three tackles in two regular-season games and two tackles and a QB hit in the 31-20 Super Bowl win over the San Francisco 49ers. But thanks to Reid’s and Mahomes’ calls, the man they call Sizzle certainly rode off into the sunset, just as he planned.
