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<\/p>\nMontee Ball shed more happy tears in 2025 than in any other year in his life. More than his dynamite years at Wisconsin. Or as a Denver Broncos running back.<\/p>\n
That year, on Jan. 15, Ball received a small congratulatory card. He set it down on the carpet and snapped a photo. It read: \u201cOf the 5.78 million who have played and coached in college football since 1869, only 1,093 players and 233 coaches have been inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. Welcome to the club, Montee!\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, in September, nine months later, Ball received notice he was also going to be inducted into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame on New Year\u2019s Day 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means more to me,\u201d Ball said, \u201cbecause of the fall.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Ball said there was \u201cno room for transparency\u201d in football when he was playing. (Courtesy of Ball)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the cold of the concrete floor he vows never to forget. It sent a sudden shiver up his spine, from the soles of his bare feet straight into his still-intoxicated mind.<\/p>\n
In the early-morning hours of Feb. 5, 2016, the record-setting former Wisconsin star running back was being processed into a jail in Madison, Wis., after a physical altercation with an ex-partner in a hotel led to his arrest.<\/p>\n
The cold concrete shocked his system. It\u2019s where he went face to face with rock bottom, a meeting several years overdue after years of alcoholism. What eats at him still, all these years later, is how he responded in the altercation. He pushed his ex-partner, who hit a desk and cut her leg.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am not the victim,\u201d he said. \u201cI acted like a coward. And I walked away a coward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four months before that arrest, Ball received a phone call from Broncos team president John Elway. The NFL Hall of Famer, who first called Ball in 2013 to draft him, was now calling to cut him. Elway had told him that his alcohol dependency, the frequenting of bars all around town every week, gave the organization no other choice but to move on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in denial,\u201d Ball said, \u201cand I didn\u2019t believe any of it until my feet touched the floor of that jail.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two days after being arrested, the TV inside the jail aired Super Bowl 50. Ball spent the entire weekend at Dane County Jail. The Broncos, the team he had grown up dreaming of playing for one day, the team that eventually drafted him, were overwhelming the Carolina Panthers en route to victory.<\/p>\n
Just two years prior, Ball was in the Broncos backfield against the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl 48. Now he was in a different shade of blue, in a crowded jail cell sharing a toilet, with a water fountain overflowing with spit and bile, with nothing but his mistakes, his alcoholism and his fragile, now-fractured ego crowding his mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour actions always lead you to where they\u2019re going to lead you \u2014 and they\u2019re your actions,\u201d Ball said.<\/p>\n
Now, more than 10 years later, Ball is a self-described open book. He has no other choice. It\u2019s what got him away from the bottle, away from the miserable person he\u2019d become under the influence of alcohol, and what has led him to where he is today \u2014 back in the Denver area, running his own nonprofit organization designed to educate coaches, administrators and parents on mental health and addiction coaching programs for young athletes.<\/p>\n
Ball, 35, is also a board member of 5280 High School, a project-based learning school for teens in recovery from substance abuse. He\u2019s in the process of lobbying for a bill at the Colorado State Capitol that would require youth coaches to take mental health training courses. His nonprofit, the Game Plan Life Foundation, is spearheading an event focused on athlete mental health on Sunday, March 8, in Broomfield, Colo.<\/p>\n
The organization plans to start implementing these eight-hour events quarterly each year. They\u2019re going to be free to whoever wants to participate, Ball said, and they\u2019re scheduled to be funded entirely through his foundation.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor people in recovery \u2014 and really everybody, too \u2014 the best medicine is service,\u201d Ball said. \u201cGiving back in some way, somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rather than point fingers elsewhere, Ball took accountability and said that crucial step in recovery helped lead him down the path toward being an outlet for others.<\/p>\n
College football fans remember Ball from his years as the centerpiece of Wisconsin\u2019s always-punishing rushing attack. Ball rushed for 5,140 yards as a Badger \u2014 third all-time in school history \u2014 and in 2011 matched Barry Sanders\u2019 NCAA single-season record for 39 touchdowns. He\u2019s the only player in the history of the Rose Bowl to rush for 100 yards in three consecutive appearances.<\/p>\n
As often as Ball could make blitzing linebackers miss with a sudden jump cut or bulldoze a safety down the field, there was no way to shirk the bouts of anxiety that led him to rely on alcohol. Jameson whiskey, he said, calmed those spells of anxiety that often percolated once he got to college.<\/p>\n
That 2011 season\u00a0 \u2014 a historic one on the field \u2014\u00a0was one of his worst off the field.<\/p>\n
He felt there was no room for transparency for what he was going through in the culture of football. He feared losing his spot at the top. More than anything, he feared exposing his anxieties and looking weak. Alcohol fed the ballooning ego that, for every shot, quelled the constant uneasiness he felt when sober. Which is why in the decade since his life changed in 2016, he has been working to implement guardrails for coaches and parents to pick up on warning signs for their student-athletes as they get older.<\/p>\n
It pains one of Ball\u2019s former teammates, Wisconsin fullback Bradie Ewing, to say it now, but he never noticed a red flag until Ball\u2019s series of arrests was made public. \u201cHe did a really good job of separating those two parts of his life,\u201d Ewing said. Ball\u2019s addiction to alcohol became so pervasive that he consciously cut food out of his diet, knowing he was going to be drinking the calories he needed to remain at a certain weight.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince the beginning of time, the function of sports has been to entertain people,\u201d said Dr. Mark Allen, a sports psychiatrist based in Denver who has done work with the Broncos, the Los Angeles Dodgers and professional wrestlers in the WWE. \u201cAnd as a result, there\u2019s a method where you want these athletes to truly be superheroes, and you forget they\u2019re actually human beings off the field.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allen, who is writing a book with Ball about his journey, said there are currently more than 25 athlete mental health nonprofit organizations nationwide. The trend of helping athletes, regardless of age, understand their anxieties or triggers is better than it ever has been. But starting at the youth level, he says, is the right \u201clong-term play\u201d since athletes who are empowered to speak up from a young age will grow up more likely to feel comfortable being transparent.<\/p>\n
It will always make Ball wonder how things might\u2019ve turned out differently for him if he felt he could\u2019ve voiced his anxieties at such a young age, rather than burying them deep within. It\u2019s why he wants his own story to be able to shed light on how quickly things can tumble, no matter where you are in life.<\/p>\n
During his time as a regular in the Broncos backfield, he was spending nearly $1,000 every two weeks at the liquor store near his home. The affinity for whiskey shifted to Everclear and Patr\u00f3n tequila, which he was consuming as much as four to five nights a week during the season.<\/p>\n
One practice, Ball jogged into the huddle and remembered Peyton Manning shaking his head as he recognized the reek of alcohol from the night before.<\/p>\n
The addiction that overpowered his mind for so long wasn\u2019t defeated that weekend in jail. Two months later, he violated his parole by being caught in a bar in Whitewater, Wis., and was arrested again that April. Former teammates wondered about Ball\u2019s future. Former Broncos running back CJ Anderson posted on social media, \u201cPraying 4 my brother MB man\u201d with three prayer hand emojis.<\/p>\n
Following his arrest in February 2016, a former girlfriend accused Ball of assault in 2014. In August 2016, he was sentenced to 60 days in jail and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and battery for his role in both domestic disputes. Ball also served 18 months of probation.<\/p>\n
His last drink was in June 2016. In the decade since, he\u2019s worked as a community outreach specialist in Madison. He lived in a Best Western for nine months, helping the unhoused community during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. After moving back to Colorado in 2022, he worked as an account manager for Sandstone Care, which provides substance abuse and mental health treatment in Colorado, Maryland and Virginia.<\/p>\n
Now his goal is to have more than 1,000 coaches and administrators attend the mental health seminar sponsored by his nonprofit over the next three years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s amazing how he\u2019s willing to share his story to help not only himself, but hopefully others that have already gone through something like this or are going through something like this,\u201d Ewing said.<\/p>\n
One of Ball\u2019s go-to football analogies makes sense considering the height of his stardom meant avoiding coughing up the ball at all costs. But he tells everyone he meets battling addiction that after you fumble, you can still reach down and pick the ball back up.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to think I\u2019m a pretty smart person, but goodness gracious, addiction can just blind you, man,\u201d he said. \u201cI beat the odds.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Montee Ball shed more happy tears in 2025 than in any other year in his life. More than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":798524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2062],"tags":[232,331,231,258,2426,7,6,2785],"class_list":{"0":"post-798523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-denver-broncos","8":"tag-broncos","9":"tag-college-football","10":"tag-denver","11":"tag-denver-broncos","12":"tag-denverbroncos","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-nfl","15":"tag-wisconsin-badgers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116188278258225671","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/798524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}