Friday Question: Which athlete left your team and broke you?

The only thing more painful than seeing your team lose a championship is saying goodbye to your favorite athlete. Time comes for us all, but there’s something uniquely heartbreaking when it comes to seeing an athlete you love leave your team.

It’s not just the player leaving, but the pain of unrealized potential. Oftentimes it’s saddled with the missed championships, unrealized dreams, and memories of a time when you though you’d see that player hoisting a trophy in your team’s colors.

Browns fans are going through that on Friday with the news running back Nick Chubb likely won’t be returning in 2025. We decided to sit down, access our feelings, and go back to the athletes who left our teams and broke us in the process.

Nick Chubb: Cleveland Browns

By Jared Mueller, Dawgs By Nature

To be clear, Chubb has not officially left the Browns, but GM Andrew Berry made it clear he is unlikely to be back. Cleveland fans have been dismayed all offseason about the possibility of Chubb moving on. Along with Hall of Famer Joe Thomas, Chubb feels like the perfect representative of how the people of the City of Cleveland see themselves.

And, unlike most Browns players since The Return in 1999, Chubb (like Thomas) was great for a number of years.

Five straight seasons with a yards per carry average of 5.0 or higher. Four straight years of over 1,000 yards rushing on a team that often struggled to win games and hasn’t had a star quarterback since Bernie Kosar. Then, Minkah Fitzpatrick of the rival Pittsburgh Steelers hit Chubb’s knee in Week 2 of the 2023 and everything went downhill from there.

A broken foot in 2024 ended his season early, but there were signs that Chubb wasn’t the same back that he used to be. Didn’t and doesn’t matter to me or the fans of the Browns. Chubb felt our passion and love for him as he recovered from his major knee injuries in 2023:

Chubb’s love for the Batman franchise not only inspired his return; he called his rehab plan “The Bat Files,” but also inspired this amazing hype video about his return:

To no longer have the NFL’s Batman representing the city and no longer getting to cheer on Nicholas Jamaal Chubb on Sundays is heartbreaking. For Browns fans, grief around Chubb’s looming departure will be felt for a long, long time.

Buffalo Bills: Thurman Thomas, Bruce Smith, and Andre Reed

By Matt Warren, Buffalo Rumblings

There are a lot of names I could put on this list going back to Jim Kelly’s retirement in the mid-90s, but the combined gut punch of losing all three of these Hall of Famers on the exact same day was something in another stratosphere. They were the last three remaining players from the Bills’ Super Bowl teams.

February 10, 2000.

Perhaps the height of 24-hour cable sports news saw the Buffalo Bills make a business decision that wasn’t necessarily wrong, but hurt nonetheless. We knew Reed was unhappy and leaving, but Smith and Thomas were surprises. According to Thomas, he found out on the ESPN news ticker, not from the team. When Smith heard Reed and Thomas were out, he wouldn’t agree to take a pay cut.

That was also a pretty ominous offseason in Bills history. In January, the Bills lost the “Music City Miracle” in what turned out to be those Hall of Famers’ last game with the Bills, and the team didn’t return to the playoffs for 17 straight seasons. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was just the start of our despair.

Carolina Panthers: Luke Kuechly

By James Dator, SB Nation.com

I have never seen a player in my life like Luke Kuechly, and yes — this is coming from someone who saw Cam Newton win an MVP award.

See, the thing about Newton and Kuechly is that they were the yin and yang of Panthers football. On one side you had Cam, chiseled out of granite to be a physical specimen unlike anything we’ve seen at the quarterback position before, but whose mechanics and decision making were suspect. Then there was Luke, branded as undersized, too small to play linebacker, but with football IQ that could fill a stadium. They shared heart and a desire to win, and it breaks me every time I think about the fact Kuechly will never have a Super Bowl ring.

When news broke that Kuechly was retiring from the NFL at age 28 it was a gut punch so visceral I remember doubling over as I read the tweet. Here was a player so all-consuming, so dominant that he was a seven-time Pro Bowler and five-time All Pro despite only playing eight seasons in the NFL. He never had fewer than 100 tackles in a season, he posted 75 tackles for a loss, recorded 18 interceptions — a staggering number for a linebacker.

Every moment he was involved in, every tackle, every celebration — Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte would rattle with a deep, throaty “LUUUUUUUKE” cheer. Kuechly wasn’t just a phenomenal player, but a lesson for everyone who’s ever been told they were too small, or physically lacking to do something, but succeeded anyway.

Ultimately I don’t blame him for quitting football. In fact, I applaud him for it. Concussions crept up and the always-intelligent Kuechly decided that his life was about more than football. He left the game for his health, for his wife, for his young children — and I will never, ever hate on him for that.

I still wish we could have basked in his brilliance for just a little bit longer.

Boston Red Sox: Wade Boggs

By Mark Schofield, SB Nation.com

Of all the teams, he went to the freakin’ New York Yankees.

Every sports fan has their transformative year, the one that turns them into fans of a team or teams for life. For me, 1986 was that year. Not only did the calendar year begin with the New England Patriots making a dream run to Super Bowl XX, but the Boston Celtics won another title that summer, knocking off the Houston Rockets four games to two in the NBA Finals, and the Boston Bruins made another run in the playoffs as well.

But for me, the Boston Red Sox were my first love.

My grandfather got season tickets shortly after returning home from World War II, and those were in our family until the 1990s. But that 1986 team solidified a life-long passion for the Red Sox in me, and I was there for Game 2 of the ALCS when Bruce Hurst steadied the ship, going the distance in a 9-2 win to even the series at 1-1 against the California Angels. Yes the Angels had a shortstop that shared my last name, Dick Schofield, but the Red Sox had my heart.

I loved that entire team, but certainly carved out a spot for Wade Boggs. For a franchise associated with some of the best hitters in the history of the sport, Ted Williams among them, Boggs was also on that list. While he was a left-handed hitter and I swung from the other side of the plate, I tried to emulate him in my own baseball journey, from being patient at the plate — Boggs was notorious for taking the first pitch of each at-bat — down to the little circular motion he would make with the bat as he waited for each pitch:

He was also superstitious as hell, from eating chicken before every game to waking up at the same time each morning. He also once instructed the Red Sox public address announcer to never say his number, after Boggs broke out of a slump in a game where the announcer forgot to include his uniform number.

The way that season ended against the New York Mets crushed me, and the image of Boggs crying on the bench haunts me to this day:

However …

Something else broke me years later. The 1992 season saw Boggs post a batting average of just .259, the first time in his legendary career he came in under .300. It came at the absolute worst time, as Boggs was set to hit free agency.

Of course, the Yankees pounced. Of course they did.

Seeing Boggs in pinstripes was painful enough, but it did not end there. Boggs and the Yankees went on to win a World Series together, and he rode around Yankee Stadium on a horse, and I hated it all.

I still do, decades later.

San Francisco 49ers: Patrick Willis

By David Fucillo, SB Nation

Professional athletes come and go. It always hits you when a favorite leaves your team, but the toughest for me was when Patrick Willis had to retire. He dealt with a variety of injuries during his career, notably playing with a cast on one hand multiple times across his college and pro careers. But the injuries proved too much. After six straight All Pro nods and seven straight Pro Bowls to start his career, Willis had to retire after the 2014 season due to injuries.

I was disappointed in the news, but I wasn’t ready for the press conference. I actually had a couple tears in my eyes when I watched his retirement press conference. I’ve had numerous favorite players across sports in my career, but this might have revealed that Willis was the favorite of them all. To have his career cut short when he was still one of the best in the game added to it, and you could see how much it hurt him to have to make the announcement. He’s since been inducted into the Hall of Fame, but it doesn’t make that press conference any easier to watch.

Who are the athletes you most regret leaving your team?