D&D: These NFL Players Formed a Dungeons & Dragons Party
Pro-wrestlers and professional actors are sharing their Dungeons & Dragons conquests with fans. D&D is everywhere, even in the NFL.
Dungeons & Dragons is more popular than it’s ever been. You can find stories about D&D when you turn to the pages of publications like Forbes or The Washington Post.
The game has been everywhere from TV shows to video games and even to professional wrestling. All these spaces are vaguely nerd-adjacent, but it wasn’t always that way.
In the early aughts of D&D, we picture everyone falling somewhere on the John Hughes Caste System . You had nerds, basket cases, princesses, criminals, and jocks.
D&D fell in the rhelm of the nerds. And jocks were about as far away from nerds as you could get.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
But those days limited identity have long since died. Now everyone’s a nerd. And a jock. Maybe a little bit of a princess– definitely a criminal– and probably a basket case, too.
Pop culture darlings like Stranger Things have declared D&D officially cool. In today’s cultural landscape, D&D is more popular than ever.
Courtesy of Netflix
The one thing it hasn’t done is grace the pages of Sports Illustrated– until now. Yesterday’s ‘Daily Cover’ was all about how Johnny Stanton, Myles Garrett, and a few other Cleveland Browns players are also not-so-secret fantasy heroes.
In fact, Garrett is actually a half-vampire named Alucard. Because just playing D&D isn’t nerdy enough.
Named for THAT Alucard.
According to the story, Garrett was first pulled into the game by Johnny Stanton.
Stanton DMs for a group including Myles Garrett, Wyatt Teller, Kendall Lamm, and a few other non-football players. It all kicked off during the great lockdown of 2020. That’s when the group got together to play through what sounds like a homebrewed version of D&D Starter Adventure, Lost Mines of Phandelver.
Courtesy of Sports Illustrated
[I]t was enough time for the beginners to get a hang of the D&D 5th Edition’s dense mechanics; accept a quest investigating some missing coal miners from the fantasy town of Phandalin; kill an undead owlbear; and encounter their campaign’s main villain, the Mold Father, in his cavernous lair before he fled through a secret tunnel. (Flapper tried to stop the escape by hurling a lasso fashioned out of rope from his equipment sack, but Teller failed the die roll that would determine whether the attempt succeeded.)
This season, they’re back in action. Teller, Garrett, and Stanton spoke about how D&D gives them a break from the worries of the world.
Myles Garrett and his teammates have fully embraced Dungeons and Dragons https://t.co/tWrwNYkqCZ pic.twitter.com/ZZghapZ7Y2
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) December 7, 2021
These are far from the only famous players to tackle D&D. But it just goes to show how much things have changed since the days before anyone was extremely online.
Happy Adventuring!
