What’s If Jarryd Hayne Was Gonna Be Cut from the 49ers Anyway?
Jarryd Hayne’s sudden exit from the NFL was almost as incredible as his dramatic entry. Like, after all he’d gone through to make the unprecedented and immensely risky move at the peak of his career to leave the NRL and chase his NFL Dream™, for him to just leave out of seemingly nowhere… well, it still doesn’t make much sense.
Having stunningly succeeded against all odds in playing actual American Football at the highest level (anyone who says that making it as far as he did in that space of time isn’t an unquestionable success should get back to yelling at kids to get off their lawn), you can’t exactly fault him for chasing another JH Dream™ of playing in the Olympics. Yeah, it’d mean picking up a third sport, Rugby Sevens, in less than four years but he made it work the last time.
Except that he didn’t make the team this time.
Fair enough too, Fijian Rugby Sevens is one legit programme, two-time defending World Sevens Series champions and all. They aren’t going to Rio to party up, they’re planning on winning the thing. Hayne’s departure barely left him time to play in the last two legs of the WSS and even then he was clearly off the pace having bulked up for the NFL. News that he didn’t make the cut for the final squad wasn’t unexpected but it does put into perspective what a spontaneous, impractical decision that seemed to be. Hindsight ain’t anyone’s best friend yet there was always a weird tinge to this thing. When he left the NRL in October 2014, he gave himself months to work on his physical conditioning. It wasn’t until March 2015 that the San Francisco 49ers signed him up and even then that was only the start. His first pre-season game came in August 2015, his official 53-man roster selection in September 2015. Eleven months of gruelling work and constant uncertainty before he could live the NFL Dream™.
Here he announced his NFL retirement on May 15, 2016 and was playing for the Fiji Sevens at Twickenham six days later. Six days. Six was also the number of games he played for them, totalling 15 minutes all up.
But… and this is just pure speculation, no inside knowledge at all to go on… what if he’d already gotten the word that he wasn’t going to be playing for the 49ers this season? That he was more than a longshot, that the team wasn’t interested in the media circus as they rebuild, that the new coach, Chip Kelly, had other ideas. Then the Fijian Sevens thing comes across as a welcome lifeline for an athlete whose absurd triumph had come amidst a ridiculous swarm of doubters always waiting for that first sign of a stumble.
Because even the way this turned out, his retirement was still met with tabloid buzzwords such as ‘quits’ and ‘turns back on’ - all spreading those negative vibes, ya dig? It was all more congenial in America, where the perspective of what he’d done hadn’t been clouded by his prior rugby league achievements. Think how the sharks might have circled if he’d left without a new Dream™ to follow. Not to say that the Fijian Sevens thing was a bluff, he obviously gave it as much as he could and for the Fijian team there was nothing to lose, but it all sort of happened before we’d had time to realise what he was walking away from at the same time.
Jarryd Hayne’s sojourn in America wasn’t without some major obstacles, which he battled his way through. Not only the history he was up against but also the odd performance and situational team issue. When Hayne fumbled with his first NFL touch, it was treated by many as a confirmation that he wasn’t good enough. It was a pretty bad error, but that shouldn’t overshadow the fact that getting to the stage where he can make errors for the 49ers in a regular season game is far beyond what he had any right to do.
Some mixture of Tall Poppy Syndrome and scorned NRL fan meant that there was always a critic waiting in the wings. It certainly didn’t help that he was now playing a sport that so few people in Australia – especially the ones who’ve been around long enough to earn established media voices – had any real clue about. You know, like when old people moan about the young folk playing Pokemon GO. For the most part the public lapped it up, though with the absolute flooding of Jarryd Hayne content that became the norm, including free to air broadcasts of 49ers matches, he became a person on whom everybody had an opinion. Particularly, as tends to be the case, the NFL uneducated.
Unfortunately that’s what he had to deal with and it can’t have been much fun for the 49ers organisation to have a horde of Aussies with microphones and cameras hustling after a depth player on the fringe of their roster. Especially when they started to integrate proper press conferences. Meanwhile back in Australia there was rarely two weeks that went by without some contrarian publishing a new exclusive about how Hayne was heading back to Australia.
Another hindsight insight could be that where there’s smoke there’s fire and although Hayne played every such question with a straight bat – even a few weeks before his retirement he was ridiculing the idea of leaving the NFL – it seems likely that with his brand as big as it became and his position in the NFL as precarious as it always was, his management was always out there asking leading questions and picking up guarantees for Plan B in case things went wrong. That seems like something that surely would have been happening. We know now and a few people would have known then how serious Hayne was about the NFL going back several years but nonetheless the call seemed a little impulsive at the time and because of that maybe some folks never really thought he was in it for the long haul. Turns out he wasn’t, but that’s not the point.
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald a month ago, Hayne said that the daunting task of learning a new NFL playbook had a lot to do with his decision to retire:
"I just think with Chip's playbook, it's such an intense playbook that it would just take too much time. Me not having that college history, I think a lot of the guys adapt to it a lot faster because they've had the college playbooks at thought. I was always behind the nine ball just learning in general.”
He’s probably right too. Given that he doesn’t know the difference between an eight and nine ball, memorising the intricacies of a playbook may be a step beyond him. The technical aspect of that sport is one that new fans that didn’t grow up with gridiron tend to take some time getting their head around and when you’re used to being the kind of athlete that busts games open, suddenly trying to fit into a system where you’re another cog in the works would be restrictive. Hayne spoke a few times about trying to get his head around the playbook last season. With a new coach coming in, he was going to have to start again from scratch.
So think about a fringe player who ranked fifth in rush yards on the team last season, is new to the sport and having troubles with the playbook. Add in that there are going to be even fewer opportunities than that this season when you consider a healthy Carlos Hyde and a much younger Mike Davis who appears to be learning at a quicker rate. Not to mention the fact that he brings with him, unintentionally, all those annoying Aussie journos and a distracting storyline. All that ignoring the possibility that Chip Kelly may not even rate him (which would be a shame because Kelly’s up-tempo scheme and penchant for thinking outside the box made him a potentially great fit for Hayne). There are other punt returners out there that have done perfectly well. You’ve just drafted another running back in Kelvin Taylor. How likely are you to have Jarryd Hayne on your 53-man active roster?
And from Hayne’s point of view given all that he sacrificed and overcame to get into the NFL, including being waived mid-season and spending a lot of it on the practise roster, the idea of doing it all again will have been daunting. Especially when your profile means you’re never short of other offers. Some battler out of small town Alabama has no other choice but to keep grinding, this is his way out. For Hayne, he has the rare luxury of a backup plan… or six.
This way, instead of leaving the NFL on a negative, he got to leave on his own terms. The Fijian Sevens team was a fun little longshot and now he gets to take his pick from any number of teams across a few different sports that’d take him. French Rugby, Super Rugby, English Super League… yeah, and the National Rugby League. Hayne has options. Although the NFL isn’t one of them, not anymore.