Matthew Stafford turned down Netflix when they asked him to be on ‘Quarterback’

The Netflix show Quarterback, which follows Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota through their respective experiences in the 2022 NFL season, is one of the streaming service’s biggest hits of the year. Highly-rated and widely-watched, Quarterback was lucky to land the eventual Super Bowl champion of last season, plus an intriguing season by Cousins and the opposite case with Mariota eventually leaving the Atlanta Falcons by the end of the year.

However, it seems that one of those quarterbacks was a second choice to Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, who reportedly turned down Netflix’s offer to star in the inaugural season of the show because he didn’t want it to negatively impact his teammates.

In last week’s episode of her podcast “The Morning After with Kelly Stafford”, Stafford’s wife Kelly Stafford noted that her husband turned them down for a variety of reasons, including his preference for privacy.

“They approached Matthew last year for this show, he turned it down. We’ve said no to quite a few approaches on reality tv shows. You guys know how private my husband is. You know how I’m not private, fuck I have a podcast explaining my entire life. But it’s also, I respect that. The only reason they’re approaching us is because of him, so I don’t fight it, plus it’s not my cup of tea (when it’s a) family show. Not my cup of tea because I don’t want to expose my girls in that way. But Quarterback is different. He didn’t do it for a couple reasons. He’s private, he also didn’t want to put his teammates through it. It was also the first year, he wanted it to kind of figure itself out so he knows what all to expect. He’s like ‘I don’t want my teammates to deal with cameras in the locker room. Here, there, whatever.’ Which I respect. I love that he thinks of those things. But I think with a season under the belt, we’ll see. I think he’ll reconsider.

He was also dealing with that injury, he didn’t want to disclose all of that to world. He passed.”

It sounds like Matt Stafford was close to accepting Netflix’s offer to be on Quarterback, but that he wanted to first find out how invasive they would be in the player’s lives. Now that the first season has been released, it sounds possible, according to Kelly Stafford, that Matthew would reconsider; Kelly Stafford said she thinks it would be great if their daughters could have something like that to watch in the future, seeing a behind-the-scenes view of what their dad goes through during an NFL season.

Whether Netflix has made any agreements with quarterbacks for another season is not yet known.

Another insight Kelly Stafford shared about her husband’s future plans came during the first half of the podcast, when she was talking about some of her own health concerns, leading to an exam from Rams teams doctors for stomach pains. Kelly Stafford, who had a benign brain tumor removed in 2019, was told that she had a stomach bug, but she fears it could be something much worse and was awaiting further test results as of the podcast being recorded last Monday. In that, Kelly Stafford mentioned that the timing was even more difficult because Matthew is heading to training camp this week and that he is “nearing the end of his career”.

“I don’t want him to worry about me. It’s football, it’s everyone’s job, and it is, but he’s nearing the end of his career and I want him to enjoy what he’s got left and not having to text me ‘Hey babe, how are you doing, did you get sick, how was your pain?’ I hate that I’m going to be that person.”

Of course, Matthew Stafford’s top priority will be the health of his wife and his family’s well-being and not the status of his career plans or anything else. That’s an understandable expectation for anybody in Stafford’s situation, whether they play football or have any other job.

Kelly Stafford shared on Instagram that Dov Kleiman’s post about her thinking “she might have cancer again” was in fact more misleading fake news from that account.

In football terms though, what “nearing the end of his career” means could be interpreted in several different ways. Stafford has played 14 seasons in the NFL, so if he only plans to play five more seasons, then that could technically be closer to the end than the beginning. It could also mean that Stafford is going to start going into any training camp, including this one, thinking that it might be his final season.

Stafford is 35 and missed eight games last season with multiple injuries. There have been reports dating back to last offseason and bubbling up again earlier this year suggesting that arm fatigue and other concerns could lead to retirement in the near future, all of which have been denied by Matthew Stafford.

For now, the Stafford’s main concern is not football, but good news about Kelly Stafford’s test results.