Marcus Mariota says the biggest realization he gained from therapy was that football had become his identity and he had lost himself because of that “I still struggle with separating football from my identity. After everything fell apart in Tennessee, I didn’t know what to do. The same thing happened in Atlanta. I thought I had learned from those previous challenges, but then it happened all over again.” “I got to the point where I was like, ‘I don’t need to do this football thing. It’s tearing me apart.’ When I got to Philly, I started talking to a sports psychologist who I still talk to today.” “That training camp was probably the worst camp I’ve ever had. I couldn’t even hit a shallow route. I was dirting flat routes. Howie came over and said, ‘I really want you to dig into your mental side a little bit.’” “Over the course of that season, I started getting away from my identity as a football player and more into my identity as a husband, a father, a son and a brother. As athletes, your sport becomes how you identify yourself.” “You hear people say, ‘You’re more than a football player,’ and you think, ‘Yeah, I know.’ But sometimes you don’t really know until something gets thrown in your face.” “Now I take about an hour a week and talk. Some of it is football, but a lot of it is just what’s going on internally. In Tennessee, I would shoulder everything. ‘Put the blame on me. I don’t care. I’ll figure it out.’ You don’t realize how much that affects you until afterward.”