Dallin Leavitt

People will often say that being a professional athlete isn’t like having a normal job.

That’s almost exactly wrong. Being a professional athlete is almost exactly like having a normal job, only moreso.

Your hours are bad — you always have to go to work when everyone else is relaxing or doing something else. Everyone thinks they want your job, and almost everyone thinks they could do it better. The new guy is literally trying to take your job, and there’s a good chance he’ll do it because management likes him better. But they only like him better because they hired him, while you were hired by their predecessor.

Your boss, meanwhile, is an egomaniac who thinks his way of seeing the world is the only correct way. No, the only possible way. And if you disagree with him, he can end your entire career over one bad moment that might not even have been your fault.

You see? Just like a normal job, only moreso.

Which explains how many people get their NFL jobs: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And Dallin Leavitt knew a guy by the name of Rich Bisaccia. And Bisaccia knew a guy named Jon Gruden.

Now an online football commentator, Gruden was once one of the hottest names in pro football. He was just 35 years old when he got his first head coaching gig, taking over the Oakland Raiders in 1998. Then in 2002, he was traded to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a rare but not unprecedented move that set the fiery Gruden up to be the head coach of a team largely compiled by the stoic Tony Dungy.

Gruden hired Bisaccia, then working for the University of Mississippi, to be his special teams coordinator, and they worked together for seven years, until Gruden was fired. Bisaccia survived the coaching staff turnover, but eventually spent a couple of seasons with the San Diego Chargers before landing with the Dallas Cowboys in 2013, which is where he stayed until 2018, when, in a curious turn of events, Jon Gruden was hired by the Oakland Raiders again to be their head coach. And, once again, he came calling for Bisaccia, who became the Raiders’ special teams coordinator.

That same year, Dallin Leavitt, a safety, had finished up his time at Utah State, where he had been teammates with a quarterback named Jordan Love. Leavitt was a good but not exceptional athlete and did not possess exceptional size, going undrafted in the 2018 NFL Draft as a result. He landed with the Raiders, where he embarked on a familiar career path for players whose athleticism may not be exceptional but whose effort is: he became a special teams dynamo.

He started slowly, appearing in just two games in 2018, but that ramped up considerably the following year. Across 15 regular season games, he played 261 snaps on special teams, racking up four solo tackles and four assists, giving him a combined total of eight special teams tackles, second on the team to another defensive back by the name of Keisean Nixon.

Injuries limited him to nine games in 2020, but in 2021 he had the best season of his Raiders career. He played 348 snaps on special teams and another 249 snaps on defense, leading the Raiders with five solo tackles on special teams and seven assists. Meanwhile, Gruden was fired midseason after a scandal involving racist emails, and Bisaccia took over as the Raiders interim head coach, guiding them to a late season rally and a playoff berth. They were bounced by the Bengals in the Wildcard Round, but Leavitt got his first taste of playoff action.

And crucially, he maintained the most important skill of his career: knowing Rich Bisaccia.

That offseason, Bisaccia was passed over for the Raiders’ head coaching gig but quickly found work as the special teams coordinator for the Green Bay Packers. And when he did, he brought a few of his special teams die-hards with him, including Dallin Leavitt and Keisean Nixon.

Leavitt picked up right where he’d left off with the Raiders, logging more than 300 snaps on special teams for the Packers in 2022. He didn’t get a single rep on defense, but he didn’t need to be on defense to make an impact. He tied for the team lead in total special teams tackles with 13, the only defensive back to break double digits that year.

Unfortunately, Leavitt’s star began to wane in 2023. The Packers’ safety room was in transition; Jonathan Owens, another safety who played significant snaps on special teams, had come to Green Bay as a free agent that offseason, offering a bit more juice on defense to go with his abilities in the kicking game. That cut into Leavitt’s special teams reps, as did the additional arrival of Zayne Anderson, another special teams-focused safety. That Anderson had also played his college ball at BYU, where Leavitt had spent his first two college seasons, only added a bit of an ironic twist: he was being replaced by what was essentially another version of himself.

Who you know can only take you so far, and football is a young man’s game. Leavitt would be 30 before the start of the 2024 season, and the clock was ticking. Special teams work does tend to be an effort-driven profession, but any loss of athleticism shrinks the margins to the point of impossibility. What’s more, the special teams landscape in the NFL was changing. The NFL implemented new kickoff rules prior to the 2024 season, changing what teams would need for their rosters. There was just less demand for smaller, special teams-only safeties, no matter who they knew or what kind of effort they brought to their work.

In normal job terms, Leavitt’s position was ultimately made redundant. The age of the special teams ace didn’t quite come to an end, but the job market shrank considerably. Who Dallin Leavitt had known had carried him quite a ways, though, and he’d gotten everything he could out of the ride along the way.