Written for the LSWA
Don’t ask Andrew Whitworth to catalogue binge-worthy Netflix series.
Chances are he hasn’t seen it. In order to contribute to the conversation, one would have to actually sit down to, you know, watch. And if you know anything about this year’s Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame inductee, well, that ain’t happening.
“No, I don’t binge shows,” Whitworth said. “I love to be active. Right now, I just walked seven or eight miles hitting golf balls. I’m always outside. That’s my version of a great day. I wake up, get my coffee, hike a mountain, hit 6,000 golf balls and then go hang out at the beach with my kids. I don’t like to sit down.”
Makes sense when you think about it. Longevity in the NFL doesn’t accompany an All-Pro career by happenstance. Laziness isn’t exactly a common trait for 16-year NFL veterans either.
The former West Monroe High School and LSU standout, who helped teams at all three levels win championships, headlines the LSHOF’s Class of 2025 being enshrined June 26-28 in Natchitoches. Event information is at LaSportsHall.com.
The never-idle Whitworth actively participated in sports growing up, like tennis, basketball, baseball, golf and powerlifting. Heck, he even threw the shot put in track and field. But each had its importance. Every sport taught the future Los Angeles Ram something that indirectly contributed to retiring as the oldest offensive lineman to win a Super Bowl. In some ways, Whitworth’s activity was his greatest gift.
“Play multiple sports,” said Whitworth with passion. “I grew to be 6’7” 330 pounds. I was going to be able to push people around with my God-given ability. But playing tennis and baseball and track and all those other things taught me a skill. Basketball, for example, helped me with my pass protection. What does playing defense look like in basketball? It’s like trying to slide protect. If you want to be a great blocker, you have to keep the defender between yourself and the quarterback. That’s just like in basketball, using your body to stay between them and the goal. A lot of things carry over.”
For a man who prides himself on being mobile, the irony isn’t lost on Whitworth that his most viral moment involved him sitting on the floor of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. His career peaked with the Rams’ Super Bowl LVI victory against (of all teams, the one he spent his first 11 NFL seasons with) the Cincinnati Bengals just days removed from Whitworth being named the 2021 Walter Payton Man of the Year. Talk about a whirlwind. Amongst all the confetti on the turf, the West Monroe native sat with his family and told his children that it was “Daddy’s last ballgame.”
“It will forever be special,” Whitworth said. “You’ll meet somebody, and you can tell they’re trying to explain to their wife who you are. Then they’ll say you probably saw him on the ground with his family at the Super Bowl. And that’s immediately when they recognize me. I don’t ever sit down and take a breath, and that was the moment for me to do it with my kids. It was one of the calmest moments of my career. I knew it was over.”
Perhaps the saddest person to see Whitworth go was his head coach Sean McVay, who didn’t mince words when it came to Whitworth’s importance to the franchise.
It was a master stroke to acquire a left tackle who finished his career with 250 NFL starts, meaning McVay was protecting quarterback Matthew Stafford’s blindside with an experienced All-Pro, sure. But it also provided leadership for a first-year head coach on the job.
“When we lost him, I thought I appreciated how valuable he was in terms of his leadership and giving me the ability to hear what I needed to hear and not what I wanted to,” McVay said. “I thought I valued it a whole lot, but since he retired, I realized what a unique human being he is. You can’t say enough good things about him. I can’t describe what he means to me. I think he has to go down as one of the greatest free agent signings of all time.”
A storybook ending for a career that featured multiple first-team All-Pro accolades (2015, 2017) and four Pro Bowl selections is quite the contrast to Whitworth’s rocky start. Put it this way — no confetti fell during Whitworth’s first live rep of middle school football at Ouachita Christian School. Not when he stood opposite of the coach’s daughter, Molly Harper, during his first practice. What happened next would be told time and again over the next three decades.
“I get in line and realize I’m going against a person with really long hair, and I’m like, ‘This is the ‘90s… There aren’t too many boys with long hair.’ Other players are like, ‘Hey dude, you better lock in,’” Whitworth remembered. “I’m thinking I don’t know how hard I want to hit her because she’s a girl, and she pancaked me and knocked me down.
“I remember thinking, ‘Maybe football isn’t for me,’ because I was a basketball kid at the time. I love to tell that story because if you have a totem pole of where you career is, near the bottom has to be what people think of when the coach’s daughter trucks you. But it’s not about that. I didn’t quit. I made a commitment to finish something, and I ended up falling in love with it.”
Redemption followed. Whitworth quickly ascended to one of the top prep players in Louisiana with the West Monroe Rebels and played a part in two national championship teams in 1998 and 2000, arguably the peak of that prestigious football program.
At West Monroe, Whitworth played for the legendary Don Shows, the 2011 LSHOF inductee who holds the fifth most wins in LHSAA football history. Whitworth transitioned from tight end to tackle his senior year and ultimately chose to play football for Nick Saban at LSU, despite admiring Steve Spurrier and the Florida Gators growing up.
Saban was honest about Whitworth projecting better as an offensive tackle, and Whitworth appreciated Saban’s candor. Wholeheartedly, Whitworth believed Shows made him tough, while Saban brought out the best in him.
“Don lived hanging off of my facemask, chewing me to pieces,” Whitworth said. “Don would take me down to get his point across. He wanted to take down our best player and fire the other guys up. It was manipulation a little bit. He was like Vince McMahon. He was a showman.
“Nick was all about having a sense of urgency to be great. Here’s the playbook, what all has to happen and what it looks like to chase greatness. Can you keep up? I loved that challenge of matching his urgency every day to be great.”
Whitworth played for legends in high school and in college and ultimately played for a Super Bowl winning coach in McVay.
“He’s the closest thing I saw to Nick Saban,” Whitworth said.
It’s quite the compliment for McVay, who isn’t afraid to give Whitworth immense credit for changing the culture of the Rams organization. McVay astutely pointed out the Rams had 10 straight losing seasons before Whitworth joined in 2017. The Rams went 55-26 with five straight winning seasons, four playoff runs and two Super Bowl appearances with Whitworth at left tackle.
“I just finished up my eighth year, and I can’t imagine what that would have looked like without him to help me as a first-year head coach,” McVay said. “That was a big edge for us.”
Before Whitworth completed the trifecta of winning a ring at every level, he was a valued member of an LSU football team that broke through and won the 2003 national championship.
“We were freaking rock stars,” Whitworth said. “Every single day, going back-and-forth to practice, we felt like we were a part of Guns N’ Roses or Aerosmith. Fans were outside our hotel. They were shaking and hitting the busses. Playing in New Orleans for the national championship when it’s been almost 50 years since you won it, that’s hard to replicate. Yeah, they’ve had talented teams since, but what that one meant, it was really special.”
Changing the culture is what Whitworth’s career is all about. He was front and center of Saban ushering in the golden era of LSU football. And you could argue he did the same for Cincinnati, as the Bengals morphed into a consistent winner from 2006-16 after posting just two winning seasons in the previous 17 years.
The numbers and accolades speak loudly, but his leadership inside the locker room reveals even more about the man whose Big Whit 77 Foundation donated $250,000 to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank during the pandemic.
Former Cincinnati offensive lineman Clint Boling, who was drafted in 2011 during the NFL lockout, had no communication with the Bengals for three to four months due to the work stoppage. A week after being drafted, Whitworth reached out to Boling, invited him to a charity golf tourney in the offseason and paid for his flight and hotel room to stay and bond with all the offensive linemen that came. Later on, Whitworth organized voluntary workouts, and once more flew Boling out to practice at the University of Cincinnati with other Bengal players. Boling never forgot it.
“One of the best ways to describe his leadership is to describe the void when he left in 2016,” Boling said. “There weren’t very many guys who could take on that leadership role because he was such a big presence with the way he would lead our group.”
Football remains a focal point of Whitworth’s life, even though it’s in a different capacity. His work now consists of breaking down the game in front of a camera, rather than taking on many hall of fame pass rushers he’s faced through the decades.
Evolution was a big part of Whitworth’s game, as he slimmed down and embraced flexibility exercises to counter the speedy pass rushers that flooded the league in the latter stages of his career. And here he is parlaying retirement to evolve once more.
Surprisingly, Whitworth admitted this new venture is a little more nerve-wracking too. Some might think he’s making a fashion statement with the hoodie under his suit on Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football telecast, but it actually has little to do with that.
“When you get feedback from people who say they love seeing you on T.V., it makes you feel good because you just don’t know,” Whitworth said. “I’m not super confident in it. That’s why I wear my hoodie. It makes me feel comfortable to be myself. I’m just trying to be me.”
Traveling from one NFL city to the next as part of a broadcast crew is a fitting “retirement” for the Louisiana legend. Nope, you won’t catch Whitworth slowing down any time soon. For a man who is seemingly always on the move, it’s a lifestyle well earned.
Jake Martin, a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame selection committee, is a multiple-time LSWA award-winning writer as the sports editor of the Ouachita Citizen.
LaSportsHall.com
