What NFL team did Carl Weathers play for?

As an athlete, Carl Weathers will always be more famous for the sports he pretended to partake in than the one he actually played for a living.

That’s because, across four Rocky movies, Weathers breathed life – and then dishonorable, Soviet-financed death – into the character of Apollo Creed. The frenemy of Rocky Balboa became every bit as iconic as the series protagonist himself, eventually spawning a next-generation franchise in the form of the Michael B. Jordan series, Creed. 

But before he was sucked into a world of Lundgren-related atrocities, Weathers had an honest-to-God career in sports. He even played in the NFL for a while – not even for the Rams or the Browns, either. For a real team. Sort of.

Carl Weathers’ football career, explained

From 1970 to 1971, the late Carl Weathers – the man who would one day teach Happy Gilmore how to putt and Tobias Funke how to get a stew going – was a linebacker for the Raiders. The Oakland Raiders. The first Oakland Raiders, not the second Oakland Raiders. 

It was, by all accounts, an inauspicious career. Weathers only played in eight games – seven during his first season, and one during his second. He later recalled being told by his coach, John Madden, that he was too sensitive to be a football star. He was released from his contract at the age of 23. From there, Weathers made a move so undignified that most folks wouldn’t have bounced back: He started playing football in Canada. 13 games with the CFL’s own BC Lions was enough for the man, and he left football behind him in 1974, pivoting toward a career in acting.

By the end of 1975, he already had 10 acting credits under his belt, ranging from single-episode stints on Good Times and The Six Million Dollar Man to a supporting role in the Pam Grier blaxploitation classic Friday Foster. It was the beginning of a series of events that would eventually make Weathers a pop culture icon, though it did surprisingly little to save him from debilitating spine injuries.