Su'a Cravens said something on Monday that should cause us all to take a step back

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — “It wasn’t really about what I wanted; it was about what I needed to do.”

The words of Denver Broncos safety Su’a Cravens on Monday morning, as he vaguely explained why exactly he walked away from football just one week prior to the 2017 NFL season.

The move left the Redskins without their starting strong safety, left media speechless and left many to criticize a man who was now seen as a “quitter.” All the while, though, few thought about the differences between the two things Cravens mentioned in that quote above—what he wanted and what he needed.

Often times in sports—a place where it’s considered normal for guys walk on a stage in their underwear in front of hundreds of potential employers—it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that these people are humans, complex humans, just like you and I.

Sometimes, it takes somebody like Su’a Cravens standing on a podium and saying something like this to remind us:

“I was going through something that I wasn’t even aware I was going through. The mindset that I had last year was just completely different from how I am now. Once I got cleared, I took a step back and looked at the way I was acting and the way I was treating my loved ones. The way my whole thought process was, I was a stranger. It was just crazy that I didn’t realize that I was in a predicament I was completely unaware of. So yeah, there was a point that I thought I was done with football, but that love for it and that need to compete, that need to be on the field and be with your brothers, that never went away.”

“I didn’t really know what was going on until I went to see Dr. Collins and he made me fully aware of the situation. At first I just thought that something was wrong with me, something’s not right and I didn’t feel the same. Once he explained, ‘This is why you feel this way,’ he’d ask me questions, I’d tell him, ‘Yes,’ and he’d say, ‘Well that’s a correlation to this.’ Everything started making sense and once we started working on it progressively I got better and better.”

Now, Cravens doesn’t need to go into specifics—and frankly, the specifics are none of our damn business—for that quote to cause you to take a step back. Whether it was something rare or something common, Su’a Cravens was going through something serious and probably going through something similar to what you or someone you know has gone through.

At that point—as it should—football took a back seat. If nothing else will, that quote should open your eyes to just how necessary that was.

“I’m not a quitter,” he said Monday, and he’s not. He’s a man who needed to step away from football to do what was best for himself and his family and, in the end, he got his mind right and renewed his love for the game.

“I just thought, ‘Football will always be there. Football is a sport that I love to play, and it’s always going to be an option that I have.’ Having it taken away, with no choice of coming back to it or having the option to get it back right then, it kind of matured me in a way. I will never take that for granted again—practice, or when you don’t feel like going in and rehabbing your body or icing it and things like that—I’m 100 percent committed to it.”

On Friday night, a fan asked me if they should be worried that Cravens would question his dedication to the game if he got another concussion.

“Wouldn’t you?” I responded.

The conversation didn’t need to go much further.

As for Cravens himself, he insists he’s all in, noting that he’s experienced the dangers of the game first hand and still wants to go out and put everything he has on the lines.

As for me, I’m just saying maybe we should worry a little more about the human inside of the jersey than what he can do for the team on the front of it.

Here’s to Su’a Cravens living a happy and healthy life.