Cutdown day: how's that feel?

Last weekend, the league's 32 teams positioned themselves for the start of the season by trimming rosters to the 53-man limit. Come inside the Titans' practice facility for a first-person account of that painful but necessary process from three who know how it feels--the head coach, a player and, of course, the Turk.

Steve Watterson

The Turk

I'm the notifier. That's what I'd like to be called. It's a little more professional than the names the players call me, like the Turk--the traditional name for the guy who does my job--the Terminator or the Grim Reaper.

Im the guy who notifies players to go see Jeff Fisher when they've been cut. I've been doing this since I joined the team in 1986, when they were the Houston Oilers and Jerry Glanville was the coach.

It gets tougher every year. This was the roughest year for me, by far, because this was such a great rookie class. They all wanted to work, they all wanted to get better, they all wanted to play. There were a great many of these players who so enjoyed what they do and considered it such a privilege to play football that they would have done it for free.

As long as I've been doing this, I can't help but have a favorite player, a guy who is kind of my dark horse. This year it was Ronald McClendon, a free-agent running back from Mississippi who was cut August 31, when we had to get down to 65 players. I took a particular liking to him because he has a good personality, he worked hard and he listened. He loved what he did, and he liked getting better.

Everybody called him "Goldie" because he had two gold front teeth. Goldie came up to me several times before he was cut and said, "Don't make it slow and painful. Just come up and stab me. Run me through." Later, he whispered, "Don't get me in front of everybody. Just pull me aside, be a sneak assassin and slowly take me out."

As much as there's a sense of humor to that story, the reality is there's no humor to this. It's a process, it's part of the game, and I try to do it as respectfully and caringly as possible.

But I've come to realize that I am a needle, and I am actually popping bubbles. Some of these guys are, in an instant, going from the potential fulfillment of a dream and fortune to having to go back to school and/or taking a low-paying, hourly job.

Some guys are so superstitious that when it starts getting close to cutdown day, they tell me, "Don't even make eye contact with me. I don't even want to look at you."

One year, there was this defensive back who had not been working very hard. The team felt he had feigned an injury and was prolonging it. I was walking down the hallway in the players' dorm to tell him he had been cut, and he started walking the other way. Suddenly, he turned around like he had forgotten something and went back into his room.

I went to his door and knocked and knocked and knocked. I started getting a little worried. What could have happened? I walked back to security and got a key to his room. When I opened the door, the room was empty. He had gone out the window and down to practice. He figured that was going to change things. It didn't. I had to pull him off the practice field.

Last night, I had a dream that Jeff released me because of age. He said, "We're going to go in a different direction; we're going with a youth movement." And when I came out of his office, there were tons of faces there of guys who I've had to tell over the years. They looked at me like, "How does it feel to be on the other side?" I guess it was tantamount to the warden being put into the prison population.

I've never talked to guys who do this for other teams. I don't think there's a Turk union or association or club chapter. This job comes up only at the end of training camp, and it's over pretty quickly. It's like a migratory pattern, a necessary pattern. But for anyone who has to do it, it's not a job to cherish.

Steve Watterson has been the Titans' strength and conditioning coach since 1986.

Jeff Fisher

The coach

When players walk through the door to my office, they know why they're coming in.

You often hear stories around the league where the head coach doesn't even talk to the players who are released. Someone else does it. I think they deserve the right to hear from me how I feel and what the rationale is for them being released. I learned a long time ago that you have to took them in the eye and tell them the truth.

Each player is different. There are those who come into training camp knowing they're going to get one last shot at taking this game as far as they can and are then willing to walk away from it at that point. Then there's the other extreme--the players who can't believe they didn't make it when, really, they had very little chance.

Today, I let a player go who had earned a spot on this roster: Dwayne Blakley. He came in here as a practice player midway through last season, kept his mouth shut and worked hard. We sent him over to NFL Europe this spring, and when he came back he was a different player.