Former Alabama football CB Bradley Sylve still hanging on to NFL hopes | Goodbread
The pop was so loud, it sounded like a gun going off.
That’s how Bradley Sylve describes the second-worst day of his life – March 8, 2016 – and the sound of his left Achilles tendon snapping in two in Alabama football’s indoor football facility, just one day before the Crimson Tide’s Pro Day workout for NFL scouts. The former Alabama cornerback naturally counts August 29, 2005 – the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall and wrecked his hometown of Port Sulphur, La. – as his worst. Right after that, however, comes the day his NFL dreams went into a tailspin.
For now, that tailspin has spun him back to Alabama, where he’ll report for practice in two weeks to join the fledgling USFL’s Philadelphia Stars. In its inaugural season, set to begin next month, the league will play all its games in Birmingham.
Sylve is 29 now, but still refuses to let go.
It’s hard to let go when details about that injury are even crueler than most people know – it not only happened the day before UA’s pro day, it happened on the last rep of Sylve’s last drill. He was supposed to end what he described as a mock pro day on the previous rep, a backpedal followed by a 90-degree break, but told his trainer he wanted to do one more.
One too many.
“That was a devastation right there,” he said.
Never a starter at Alabama – Sylve played behind Cyrus Jones and Marlon Humphrey – he nevertheless had sub-4.3 speed in the 40-yard dash, plenty fast enough to get a shot at the NFL until his injury cost him a step. The injury made him undraftable in 2016 and he spent more than a year rehabbing his Achilles.
He ran a 4.4 for scouts at Alabama’s pro day the following year, but from there, his suitcase picked up a lot of stickers. The Buffalo Bills signed him in April of 2017 but released him before the season began. The New Orleans Saints picked him up later that year but never put him on the field and let him go after a few weeks. Saints coach Sean Payton told him he had what it took to make it in the NFL – Sylve never forgot that, and still believes it.
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He played for the Birmingham Iron of the Alliance of American Football in 2019, only for the league to fold on him midseason. He was drafted by the DC Defenders of the XFL in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic put that league on ice. At one point, he quit a warehouse job in Metarie, La., to sign with the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts, but the deal fell through when the negative COVID-19 test result the team needed to bring him in didn’t arrive within a 24-hour window before his flight. If it were all a sign from above, the message would be for Sylve to hang it up and move on. But he’s still buckling helmets.
He doesn’t know when he'll pull the last one he ever wears off his head. He still hopes it will have an NFL logo on the side; but for now, he’s being fitted for one representing yet another start-up league. This USFL is a new incarnation of the old USFL that folded in 1986 after three seasons. Eight start-up franchises are using the same cities, names and logos of their 1980’s predecessors, but apart from that, the old USFL and the new one couldn’t be any more different.
The business model that drove the original USFL was both bold and unsustainable, resulting in both a flash of success and its shuttering. Its club owners threw around big dollars to attract big names – Herschel Walker, Jim Kelly and Reggie White, to name three – and drive ticket sales. The majority of its rosters, however, were stuffed with low-paid has-beens and never-made-its. The new USFL is playing its hand far more conservatively, with all players on a standard contract and no plans for its teams to even leave Birmingham until at least Year Two.
Sylve only hopes it works.
“I’m hoping and praying another league doesn’t fold on me. Every time I get in a new league, something keeps bringing it down,” Sylve said. “I want this league to stay afloat – I just want to finish one full season, that’s it.”
He loves the game to his core. That’s one thing that can be said of anyone who is still bouncing around in start-up leagues at nearly 30 years old. At the NFL Scouting Combine, which just wrapped up Sunday, NFL clubs invest a lot of effort into determining which prospects really love the game, and which just love the money. Sylve will be hoping a year in the USFL gets him one more shot in an NFL camp. They might question his talent, or his injury history, or his ability to catch on in the NFL at his age.
But one thing they won’t have to worry about is what the game means to him.
Reach Chase Goodbread at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter at @chasegoodbread
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Alabama football's Bradley Sylve hopes the USFL can be his NFL ticket
