Super Bowl champ says NFL’s ‘woke’ politics drove him to retire: ‘The Lord showed me the door’

A Super Bowl champion with the Kansas City Chiefs said Thursday that the NFL’s politicking and COVID rules helped push him out of the game.

Anthony Sherman, a fullback who retired last year after a 10-year career, said he wanted to become a law-enforcement officer and had had enough of the league’s “woke” public stances.

Sean “Sticks” Larkin, the co-host of the Law & Crime network’s “Coptales and Cocktails” podcast, asked the former Chiefs player whether “you miss it?”

“I don’t,” Mr. Sherman replied. “My goal was 10 [years], and I got 10. And the Lord showed me the door with all of the political stances the NFL was making, the COVID policies, all of this nonsense.”

Mr. Sherman described God as making the retirement decision easier.

“He was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to make it easy for you. I gave you 10 and then head on down the road.’ And then he opened up another door with all this law enforcement stuff. And it’s been a good transition so far,” he said.

Mr. Sherman is a part-time sheriff’s deputy in Bourbon County, Kansas, and also works as a part-time officer with Homeland Security Investigations, the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative branch.

The fullback played eight years with the Chiefs, including their victory in Super Bowl LIV, and spent his first two seasons with the Arizona Cardinals.

In an interview earlier in that off-season, though, Mr. Sherman had suggested a willingness to return to the Chiefs, even if he’d have to take a pay cut to do so.

“I will probably do whatever I can to get back to Kansas City just because I want rings,” he told NFL Network.

The podcast hosts also asked Mr. Sherman whether his outspoken support of law enforcement caused problems in the Chiefs locker room, with so many of the league’s players being prominent critics of police tactics in the past several years since Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem.

He said it did not.

“I kind of had one of those, like, ‘this is who Sherman was, this who Sherman is, like, leave him alone. He’s going to have his opinion, and he’s not going to change his mind about it,” he replied.

Mr. Sherman said he “had a respect in the locker room, that it wasn’t, ‘Oh, geez, here comes Sherman,’ whatever … I am who I am, and if you don’t like it, then we don’t have to talk. I’ve got my friends. I don’t need many more.”