In his 14th and perhaps final season, Cameron Jordan wrestles with a concept that’s familiar to every NFL player. There’s an end date to his career, to chasing quarterbacks and winning games and wearing that fleur-de-lis logo on his New Orleans Saints jersey. Soon, whether it’s at the end of the 2024 season or some point not far beyond that, he will enter life as a civilian, becoming a retired professional athlete. He will enter that next phase, the one so many dread, and the one so many others embrace—what’s next?
Jordan’s lucky, though. It didn’t take him 14 seasons to consider what many athletes elect never to consider, a concept they ignore until they have to when forced by injuries, circumstances or that most inevitable of opponents, time.
It didn’t take Jordan one season to understand his athletic mortality.
It didn’t even take this season when his role shifted, his snap count dwindled and a sizzling start that pushed the Saints onto lists of Super Bowl contenders gave way to six consecutive losses from Sept. 22 through Sunday.
No, Jordan always understood that football wouldn’t last forever. He watched his father, Steve Jordan, retire from the NFL after 13 decorated seasons and six Pro Bowl nods as a tight end. Pops played his entire career with the Minnesota Vikings. Cameron wanted to carve a career like that one, with roots and acclaim, as a centerpiece who lasted but knew it wouldn’t last forever, who knew it never does.
“You always know you’re close to the end,” he says two days before a pivotal Week 8 matchup against the Chargers in Los Angeles. “In the very beginning, that’s the moment your clock starts.”
That’s how Jordan chose to approach pro football. That’s the only approach he ever considered. It’s the approach he assumed from his first NFL snap, at Green Bay in the 2011 opener, to snap No. 11,821, which he clocked against the Chargers on Sunday, like so many fall afternoons that came before.
Still, he entered this 2024 season, which looks more and more like his final campaign, knowing it would be different. In prominent ways, every season is its own experiment in health and roster manipulation and camaraderie and circumstances, the combination in any year shifting fortunes from poor to promising to just plain strange.
This past spring, Jordan did what he always does. He gave his body most of February and March off, to heal and regroup, an annual exercise in reclaiming what’s lost throughout any one season. Only then did he assess the year ahead. He knew, as he detailed in the first installment of , the peek Jordan is allowing into his latest NFL campaign, that the Saints teemed with talent in his position group, specifically. His most talented defensive-line counterparts were younger—in most cases, especially where it mattered, younger. They hadn’t turned 35 in July. They weren’t coming off ankle surgery for torn ligaments.
He had to cling to realism, with clear eyes and reasonable expectations, controlling what he could control. His football mortality felt heavier and closer than ever before. Jordan soon decided on a revenge tour of sorts. His would leave a final imprint on a borderline Hall of Fame career.
