Former NFL star Isaac Rochell got real about the mental health struggles he faced while playing professional football.
During his Wednesday, March 11, appearance on the “Real Pod” podcast, the former athlete said his struggles started while playing college football. Rochell, 30, recalled the “dark” days as a D1 athlete at the University of Notre Dame.
However, things got worse when he was playing professionally.
“I think your fight or flight that you develop in college just carries over,” Rochell explained. “Everything felt so intense in college — down to how a coach might even [make] a facial expression — everything hits you.”
Rochell was drafted by the Los Angeles Chargers during the 2017 NFL Draft. He played on the Indianapolis Colts, Cleveland Browns and Las Vegas Raiders throughout his career before announcing his retirement from the league in February 2025.
“I wanted to retire even earlier because I [had] a whole year of waiting and not getting calls, and I just wanted to be done with it,” Rochell recalled during Thursday’s podcast. “I just wanted to silence the noise and just be done. I don’t want to identify with this anymore. It’s just tough. Being in limbo is tough.”
He and wife Allison Kuch, who share daughter Scottie, 2, are now full-time content creators. They are gearing up to welcome a second daughter.
Keep scrolling for Rochell’s mental health revelations from his “Real Pod” podcast appearance:
Feelings of DepressionRochell explained that he “really started to struggle” with mental health stressors while in the NFL.
“You get released, or you switch teams,” he recalled. “Every day you’re going into the facility, you’re miserable.”
Rochell said was “never” diagnosed with clinical depression, but playing for the Browns and the Colts he was “pretty darn close.” He added, “You’re just like, ‘I hate this.’”
What Happened on the Colts?Even though Rochell’s deal with the Colts was the “best” one he ever signed, the former athlete hated his time on the team.
“When you’re in a toxic environment, there’s a cliff where it’s chill, chill, chill, and you can deal with the toxicity and the stress. Then it just gets really bad,” he continued. “When it happens, it’s hard to undo, and it puts you in that state of overanalyzing coaches, overanalyzing conversations.”
When Rochell spoke with teammates, he would walk away from the conversations wondering if they thought he was a “horrible” player.
“I just fell off the cliff of toxicity,” he added. “It’s tough.”
Rochell explained that he eventually realized “there’s a problem with them,” not him.
“Even in my NFL career realizing, like, no, this coach is actually just not a nice guy,” Rochell said. “He’s probably miserable in every phase in his life. I can’t let that affect me.”
He added, “There were situations where coaches would call me out and be wrong, maybe raise their voice, and I would be like, ‘That’s not true,’ in the meeting in front of people. You have to hold your own in those situations.”
Rochell alleged he and one Colts coach couldn’t stand each other. Rochell claimed the coach would even make snide comments about his TikTok career, which was growing at the time.
“Somebody else could do something wrong, and somehow it comes back to me,” he said. “I’m the example of doing stuff wrong.”
While Rochell would confide in his teammates while dealing with rough coaches, he didn’t have close friends on the Colts initially.
“You have built in friends because, by association, it becomes really challenging when you’re getting yelled at and you’re like, ‘I don’t really have anybody right now to vent to,’” he said. “That’s where I think things got really, like, lonely for me.”
He felt like a “stranger” in the Colts locker room, which was a “really isolating” experience. “That was, like, a dark point in my career,” Rochell recalled.
