Pat O'Connor announced his retirement on social media Thursday, ending a nine-year NFL run that began with a 2017 Draft call and finished with a Super Bowl ring. In his post, O'Connor said, “What a ride it's been. After 9 incredible years, I think it's finally time to hang up the cleats.”
That is why his name is drawing attention now: a player once taken with the 250th pick by the Detroit Lions out of Eastern Michigan is closing the book on a career he says lasted exactly two teams, a draft and a championship. O'Connor wrote that if someone had told his younger self he would play that long, spend his entire career with just two teams, get drafted and win a Super Bowl, he would have called it crazy.
The path behind the farewell was not as clean as the line in his post suggests. Detroit drafted him, then cut him before the 2017 regular season, and he signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after that. He spent most of his first two seasons on the practice squad, appeared in three total games in that stretch, then was promoted to the active roster in mid-September 2019.
His final season note carried real weight because it was not just about longevity. In Super Bowl LV, O'Connor played 27 special teams snaps in the Buccaneers' victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, giving the retirement post a ring of truth that numbers can back up even when the career arc was uneven.
O'Connor thanked teammates, friends and coaches in the same post, saying he appreciated the memories, the friendships and everything in between. What he did not say was why Thursday felt like the moment to stop, and that leaves the simplest answer as the lasting one: after surviving the cut, the practice squad grind and a title run, Pat O'Connor walked away on his own terms.
