Four NFL quarterbacks on a green background.
Four NFL quarterbacks on a green background.
On February 4, 2006, the night before Super Bowl XL, assistant coach Jim Zorn gathered his men after a chapel service. “Isn’t God so good?” he said, beaming. He was looking into the eyes of the Seattle Seahawks quarterbacks—especially those of Matt Hasselbeck.
The next evening, Hasselbeck was to start in the Seahawks’ first ever NFL championship appearance, against the Pittsburgh Steelers. “It’s gonna be so cool,” Zorn told him, “to kneel at the 50-yard line after the game and pray with the Steelers, win or lose.” Hasselbeck nodded. Of course it’s going to be cool, he thought—mostly because he thought the Seahawks were going to win.
Instead, Seattle was heavily penalized, Hasselbeck threw a fourth-quarter interception, and Pittsburgh claimed a 21–10 victory to capture its fifth Super Bowl title. The confetti rained black and gold.
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“Everything in me wanted to just go to the locker room,” Hasselbeck said. “To just change and be done.” Yet he’d committed to the postgame prayer.
So he knelt—hat backwards, eyeblack intact—beside two teammates, Shaun Alexander and D. J. Hackett. Alexander had his head in his hand, exasperated. Hackett, like Hasselbeck, watched the distant Steelers dancing and hugging their families. The scene was captured in a photo that Hasselbeck revisits to this day. It was hard, he said, to glorify God at that moment.
Hasselbeck, now 50, hasn’t lost his competitive edge. He spoke with CT by phone while visiting an Indianapolis Colts preseason practice. He wouldn’t mind it if he’d taken the call wearing a Super Bowl ring from that pivotal game. “But I don’t know if I would remember it the same,” he said. Nor does he think he would’ve been as prepared for life’s bigger defeats.
“Recently I’ve been at funerals—it feels like too many,” Hasselbeck said. Last April, he lost his father, Don, a former NFL player himself, to a sudden cardiac arrest. “And it doesn’t feel so unnatural to praise God, to be grateful, even at a funeral. It’s hard to comprehend.”
Today’s Christian athletes have more avenues than ever before to share their faith, and God rarely gets more glory than after a game-winning touchdown. Philippians 4:13 has become a familiar catchphrase in postgame interviews and social media posts: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” But most athletes omit Paul’s sentiment in the subsequent verse: “Share in my troubles.”
Hasselbeck has grown to appreciate players who champion God at their lowest. They are the players whose stories, like those of David and other colossal biblical figures, are written in and through brokenness. “Very rarely,” Hasselbeck said, “is it ‘Yeah, we won a national title and I realized I needed God.’”
In the NFL, no player is under more pressure than the quarterback. They are endlessly debated and scrutinized—their contracts, their records, their styles of play, their fashion choices. Win and they’re crowned. Lose and they’re condemned. The backup quarterback, as the saying goes, is always the most popular guy in town.
Many Christians have called on their faith to weather this storm. Kirk Cousins, now with the Las Vegas Raiders, told Sports Spectrum that this clicked in college, when he threw a crushing interception against Notre Dame in his first road game as a starter. He was hit so hard that he couldn’t see the end of his wayward pass, but he could hear “the deafening sound of 80,000 people cheering my failure.” So he went right to the sidelines and thanked God his life wasn’t defined by football, because “this is a bad deal for me.”
Cousins’ publicly devout faith once made him more polarizing among NFL fans. He was like Tim Tebow and Russell Wilson. These guys were a little too clean for the rowdy football fan, a sort of antithesis to Tom Brady in his prime—the bad boy who dates models, fights suspensions, and stacks up trophies.
Ironically, Brady’s most stunning Super Bowl defeat came against one of these “Boy Scout” quarterbacks. Nick Foles started for the Philadelphia Eagles early in his career, but the Austin, Texas, native almost quit football after he was traded to a lowly Rams team and lost all joy for the game. He prayed, considered becoming a pastor, and eventually returned, content as a backup—even for the Eagles who’d dumped him.
The rest is Eagles history: Called into action after young phenom Carson Wentz suffered a late-season injury in 2017, Foles morphed into an unflappable pocket general, outdueling Brady in Super Bowl LII to give Philly its first Lombardi Trophy. Brady fled the field, infamously robbing Foles of a postgame handshake.
Meanwhile, the unlikely champion had quiet remarks the next day: “I’m not perfect,” Foles said. “I’m not Superman.” He would soon be ushered out of Philadelphia (again), into another run of failed backup gigs, but he was immortalized in NFL lore—and outside the Eagles’ stadium with a bronze statue—because of his heroic humility.
Trey Burton, a former Eagles tight end who threw a trick touchdown pass to Foles in their Super Bowl win, saw his teammate’s character the moment they met. It was 2014, three years earlier, and Burton was a 22-year-old rookie, entering the locker room for the first time. Foles invited him to a Bible study. When Burton showed up the next morning, he found Foles leading the study himself, preaching away. “I’m like, ‘What the heck am I doing with my life?’” Burton told CT.
Three years later, Burton needed a place to stay. It was spring, and he hadn’t renewed his lease, unsure if he’d still be in Philadelphia. So Foles let him room with him. Then the tight end got meningitis right in the middle of spring practices. “I’m laying in his guest room, sick as heck,” Burton said. “I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m in trouble.’” Foles drove him to the hospital, helping nurse him back to health behind closed doors.
Carson Wentz, Foles’ former Eagles teammate, followed a different, and in some ways longer, road to embracing his lows. He was Philly’s crown jewel at the time of his injury—a big, gung-ho playmaker out of North Dakota State. He even said all the right things after suffering his fateful ACL tear, telling fans over social media that he had “100 percent confidence” in Jesus’ plans. He smiled from the podium as the world watched him hand the Lombardi Trophy to Foles, who’d taken his place to become the hero of the day.
In private, however, Wentz felt like Jacob wrestling God. James 1:2 was on his mind—Christians were supposed to find “pure joy” in their trials. “I was like, yeah, I would rather just read that and know that,” he told CT this spring, “than actually have to live and do that.”
A decade later, Wentz is mostly a tale of what might have been in Philadelphia. He raced back from his injury, spent three more mercurial years in green, and is now a 33-year-old backup with the Minnesota Vikings, his fifth team since leaving the Eagles. To this day, he believes God is teaching him—sometimes not in the ways he would prefer—to be “open-handed.”
In some ways, it’s gotten easier. Wentz has been every type of quarterback—the highly paid star, the discarded flameout, the couch-bound free agent, the aging insurance policy. Nothing surprises him, and this lends itself to childlike faith: Who knows what’s next?
Still, it hurts. In 2025, coming off the bench for the Vikings, he took such a beating that at one point he could be seen slumped on the bench, his shoulder broken and dislocated, his misty eyes suggesting he was pondering just how much longer he could subject himself to this kind of work.
“It’s real,” Wentz said. “God wants us to bring our emotions, our real opinions, and not just try to put it on our shoulders and say, ‘I got this.’ … I battle that every day, and quite frankly, I’ve been doing it every year of my career. Learning to say, ‘God’s plan, not mine. God’s plan, not mine.’”
How God’s plan intersects with Monday Night Football or the durability of his throwing arm is beyond Wentz, who like many supersized quarterbacks has experienced both the blessing and curse of leaning into the sport’s physicality. Yet his violent, vagabond journey has produced other fruits. Away from the cameras, he’s had coaches, teammates, and friends outside the game open up to him because he can relate to their own instabilities.
Each morning, while driving his truck to the Vikings facilities in Eagan, Minnesota, Wentz asks God “to give me eyes to see the way that he sees,” whether that’s teammates, trainers, or cafeteria workers. Before he leaves his home, he tries to read the Bible instead of the news. One of his meditations this offseason was Romans 12:2: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
“It’s weird being the old guy now,” Wentz said, but it gives him a chance to model a renewed mind for younger players who may have coasted off the “spiritual highs” of men’s conferences or other “big ‘aha’ moments,” like he once did. Following Jesus at this stage is both frustrating and freeing, he said, but he’s committed to “maximizing those hardships” to become more like Christ.
Malik Willis is trying to carry a similarly renewed mind into what’s arguably the first proper starting opportunity of his NFL career. After two years behind Jordan Love with the Green Bay Packers, the 27-year-old got $45 million guaranteed this spring to take over the Miami Dolphins. But he views his rollercoaster ride to the Sunshine State as a “necessary process”—part of God’s plan.
Willis played at two Georgia high schools and still couldn’t convince many top colleges to recruit him. The few that did, like Virginia Tech, saw him as an “athlete,” not a quarterback. He entered his senior year without any offers and watched teammates stack up scholarships and camp invites. “I felt like hard work wasn’t working,” Willis told CT.
He remained in anonymity at Auburn, sitting behind future NFL veteran Jarrett Stidham for two years, then sat unclaimed in the transfer portal for a month. When Liberty University, which had just moved to the top division of college football, finally hosted him for a visit, Willis felt he got some divine direction. The morning of his tour, he read the verse of the day on his Bible app—2 Corinthians 3:17—and then saw the same verse hanging from the rafters at Liberty’s indoor practice facility. He was sold. And he was hot enough as the Flames’ quarterback to be drafted himself.
Then came God’s next test: playing for the Tennessee Titans. Willis admitted he didn’t play well during his two years in Nashville. He was sacked 14 times in 11 games. His rookie year, the Titans had a league-leading 28 players on injured reserve. After his second year, in 2023, the Titans fired their coach. They’ve been rebuilding ever since.
Willis said he tries to surrender to God through every turn. “Otherwise you’ll be thanking him, you’ll be doubting him, and you’re just in limbo,” Willis said. That kind of double-mindedness, he said, is what James 1:8 calls “unstable.”
The Dolphins aren’t exactly a beacon of stability in Willis’ first year in town. The team has a new coach and has gone 25 years without a playoff win—the longest active drought in the NFL. They’re asking Willis to headline a stripped-down roster in a division featuring teams from each of the last two AFC championships. But “football is football,” Willis said, “and it’s not gonna last.”
He’s excited to hold a No. 1 spot for a new city. He just can’t bring himself to be ungrateful. He was the first in his immediate family to graduate from college. He was raised in a loving household. He’s more thankful for that than for the potential praise—or rage—of avid fans. “It’s hot air,” he said.
Dreadlocks poking from his helmet, Willis’s calling card isn’t his mobility outside the pocket so much as his penchant for giving away pizzas and Nike gear to homeless people he visits outside his hotels. Others contact Willis looking for celebrity access, only for him to respond with a Bible verse. This is what he used to pray for—not that his teams win or that he’s the reason somebody cashes in big on a Sunday wager, but that he gets a chance to glorify God, whatever his standing.
John 13:7 is the verse that Jalen Hurts repeats the most. The Eagles’ current quarterback is like a walking motivational quote, notorious for straight-faced philosophizing. Before his first Super Bowl appearance, he said he “had a purpose before everybody had an opinion.” Before his second, he said of the game, “It’s already been written.” He is private, calculated, and very conscious of his legacy, even speaking of himself in the third person. Still, he’s used Jesus’ words—“You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand”—to describe his relationship with failure.
Benched at halftime of a national championship during his sophomore year with Alabama, and barely upstaged by Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs in his first Super Bowl, Hurts hardly seemed content even after routing Kansas City in a title rematch two years later. How did he form such a relentlessly high standard? “By losing,” he said.
Matt Hasselbeck never got another chance to make up for his Super Bowl defeat. But someone from that game’s officiating crew did find him years later, while refereeing another matchup. The official approached Hasselbeck with a tearful apology, the quarterback told CT, well aware that the Seahawks’ loss to the Steelers had been impacted by a series of close calls against Seattle.
The ref lamented that he’d not had his best day and shared of his wife’s recent passing. “We had this moment,” Hasselbeck said. It set a tone for the veteran. “Never, ever, ever again have I complained about officials,” he said. And neither were his three kids—all Division I athletes—allowed to do so. Instead, Hasselbeck said, they learned to exhibit mental toughness and “the aroma of Christ.”
His own beginnings now seem like a distant memory. He wanted to be a first-round pick, but he was barely on the NFL’s radar at Boston College. He didn’t get a scouting combine invitation; instead, he got hepatitis A on a mission trip to Kingston, Jamaica.
But Hasselbeck still thanks God that he dropped to the sixth round of the draft back in 1998, where the Packers—a team that had been to two consecutive Super Bowls—could scoop him up and put him in the same building as Brett Favre, Mike Holmgren, Doug Pederson, and Andy Reid. Even after his own name matched theirs in significance, Hasselbeck learned to anticipate his next hiccups.
“I played almost two decades, and I don’t remember the touchdowns,” he said. “I really don’t. I remember the interceptions and the lessons learned.”
The book on a red background.
The book on a red background.
The book on a green background.
The book on a green background.
A watercolor painting of a carpenter in his workshop.
A watercolor painting of a carpenter in his workshop.