Patrick Willis: Zero chance I return from retirement

Former San Francisco 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis said there’s zero chance he’ll return to the NFL after retiring this offseason.

Patrick Willis just retired from the NFL this offseason, but he’s already fielding questions about the chances that he might return after taking a year off to rest his mind and body. Willis quickly refuted such a thought process when discussing as much with Pro Football Talk.

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When former linebacker Takeo Spikes asked Willis for a one through ten scale as far as his chances of returning to the game. Willis’ response? “Zero.” His reasoning? Largely, it came down to pained feet, which Willis said constantly nagged at him throughout his career.

“The time for me has come,” Willis said. “It’s time for change, and honestly it’s something that when I had that [toe] surgery, I’ve been talking about my feet for a long time, and people choose to hear what they hear. Sometimes people hear something that they just brush right off because to them it doesn’t really resonate. . . . I understand that it was something that was talking to me, and talking to me for a long time and when I hurt my toe in that game I felt like, as soon as it happened, I went down and I felt it.”

You can’t run far without your feet and few knew that adage better than Willis, who missed much of the 2014 season for the San Francisco 49ers with toe surgery that was a result of sore feet. In reading his words, you can see that Willis was in pain every step and eventually needed to lift that pain from his life.

“It felt like somebody had lifted a million pounds off my back because you know as well as I do, as long as we played together, that I’ve always talked about our feet then. We play on turf this week, then it’s my feet this or my feet that. To the point where people are like, you talk about it so much that it becomes redundant and people are just like, ‘Quit talking about your feet.’ . . . They don’t know what I truly feel.”

If there’s anything we’ve learned about the NFL, it’s that issues of chronic pain don’t fade by playing football in the league. Willis gave it his best shot, but now it looks like he’s content to hang up his cleats and kick his feet in the air.

“I’ve always enjoyed [playing football] and it’s always been a special place for me, like a sanctuary or something in a sense where it’s almost like an escape. But what I couldn’t escape was that I was feeling in my feet. Like something was telling me there was only a matter of time.”

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