The injured Commanders RB opens up to Boardroom on joining Netflix’s Christmas Day broadcast, balancing media dreams, rehab, and entrepreneurship.
Austin Ekeler doesn’t sound like someone preparing for life after football; he sounds like someone already built for it. That much was clear during our video chat this week, as the Washington Commanders running back discussed his role on Netflix’s studio coverage of the Christmas Day showdown against the Dallas Cowboys.
Ekeler and analysts Michael Irvin and Devin McCourty will be joined on the desk by host Kay Adams, with Ian Eagle, Matt Ryan, and Nate Burleson calling the action from Landover, Maryland. The 30-year-old suffered a season-ending torn achilles injury in Week 2, so Netflix approached Ekeler about joining the studio crew, an opportunity he said he accepted without consulting the team first.
“I saw this as an opportunity to provide some type of value to my team, as I can’t play,” Ekeler told Boardroom. “I’m pretty much useless when it comes to on-the-field opportunities, but hopefully I can hype my team up as much as I can from the sideline.”
Ekeler knows the Commanders inside and out, from the team’s playbook to head coach Dan Quinn‘s philosophies. He’s excited to express them to millions next week.
“It’s not been the season that we expected it to be,” Ekeler said of his 4-10 Commanders. “However, I know with DQ and what he’s done, he’s kept that team’s spirits high and is making sure they’re fighting for every blade of grass. So, I’m looking forward to describing the controllables as football players on a football team.”
Throughout his nine-year NFL career, Ekeler has been building toward this Netflix moment. He’s hosted Twitch streams talking football called The Ekeler Dome, done local postgame radio segments over the last few years, has recorded regular segments on The Fantasy Footballers podcast, and said he’s taken a broadcasting bootcamp in the past. On Christmas, Ekeler aims to discuss X’s and O’s honestly without putting down his teammates.
“You are there to have an opinion, you are there to express yourself,” he said. “I’m talking about the reason why the stats are the way they are, whether they’re good or bad. And I’m looking to really bring some good energy to a good production with Netflix.”
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If Ekeler’s Netflix debut goes as well as I expect it to, there are going to be even more calls for him to be in the media when his NFL career is over. But the longtime pass-catching threat is conflicted on whether it’s something he’d want to do long term.
“It’s tough,” Ekeler said. “I need to weigh the self-fulfillment that I’ll get out of that career choice. I just have to make sure that if I want to go that route, that I’m ready to commit to that type of lifestyle, and that would take a time away from other opportunities that I might have.”
Ekeler has long been an investor and entrepreneur off the field. His current venture is as the owner of a free sports contest and tournament platform called Fantasy Royale, which is catered toward people to enjoy the sports they love without having to spend money on sports betting. If Ekeler wants to do media, he’d have to be all in and put his business ambitions aside, which seems difficult for him.
“I have a creative mind, which is a blessing and a curse,” Ekeler said. “I’m always trying new things and putting them into play, which means I always have too many ideas and I’m very proactive in trying to build new things. We all have capacity and bandwidth, and the more you put on your plate, the more it gets stretched in different directions. You might be going full speed, but if you’re going full speed at two things, it’s impossible to focus wholly on one thing.”
After he tore his Achilles on Sept. 11, Ekeler said he couldn’t walk for about two months and depended on his wife for many basic necessities. He still can’t walk distances with a flat foot, needing a shoe on or a heel lift. Ekeler said he’s going 100% in attacking his rehab as he looks to get back into peak physical shape.
“I need to make a decision after I’m able to physically play and back to the full capacity that my legs will allow,” Ekeler, whose Commanders contract expires after this season, said. “The approach I’m taking is don’t even think about that answer right now.”
Ekeler played the first four seasons of his career with the Los Angeles Chargers, where he played alongside Philip Rivers, who improbably returned to the NFL as a 44-year-old grandfather last Sunday with the Indianapolis Colts after last playing an NFL snap in 2020.
“It was definitely a shock, but I thought it was amazing,” Ekeler said. “But if anyone could come back and play with the play style the Colts have, it’s Phillip Rivers because he isn’t as mobile. It’s all about putting him in a position where he can just manage the ball and protect himself. I was like, if anyone can do it, it’s Philip. And he displayed that when he went out there. I thought it was amazing and was rooting for him the whole time.”
While we know who Ekeler will be rooting for next week as he sits in the analyst chair on Netflix, NFL fans around the world will get to witness how good he is as a broadcaster as a preview of what he’s truly destined to do once he’s eventually ready to hang up his cleats as a player.
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