Miami Dolphins’ Alec Ingold on being nominated for Walter Payton NFL Man of Year Award.
Miami Dolphins’ Alec Ingold on being nominated for Walter Payton NFL Man of Year Award.
- Alec Ingold will announce the Miami Dolphins’ second-round draft pick.
- Ingold, a former Bay Port High School and University of Wisconsin standout, is entering his seventh NFL season.
- Ingold is a three-time Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee for his community service work.
GREEN BAY – Alec Ingold was back home in the Green Bay area recently when he received an email from the Miami Dolphins player engagement team.
They wanted to know if the Dolphins fullback and former Bay Port star would announce the team’s second-round selection at the NFL draft on April 25, joining a list of past Dolphins players to perform the honor. It includes all-time great and fellow fullback Larry Csonka.
The kid from Suamico has had plenty of dreams come true thanks to some good old-fashioned hard work and determination.
Consider this another one on the list.
Of the 32 former and current players who will be announcing a selection during the second and third rounds, Ingold is the only one who was undrafted. He appreciates the irony in that.
“It’s unique,” Ingold said. “Every team selects one guy to go up and do it, and then for it to be back home, it’s like a full-circle moment. I don’t know the last time there was an NFL league-wide event hosted in Green Bay. We will see what the pick is, but the anticipation and excitement leading up to it is cool.
“All eyes being on Green Bay in the football world will bring a lot of nostalgia, a lot of historic memories and moments, from Lambeau Field and the Packers growing up. Across the league and across the country. Everyone is going to be watching, and it’s going to shine a great light on what the community has been up to.”
Ingold experienced his own gripping draft weekend in 2019, anxiously waiting with hope that his name would be called at some point during the three-day event.
After finishing his four-year collegiate career at the University of Wisconsin and graduating with a degree in business finance in December 2018, he went to Nashville in the months leading up to the draft to train twice a day with other hopeful NFL prospects.
Nobody really expected him to be drafted in the first round on Day 1 or in the second and third rounds on Day 2.
But the final day left some hope.
Round 4 came and went. So did Round 5. Round 6. Round 7.
“I was getting calls and getting recruited toward that sixth and seventh round,” Ingold said. “Had to pick up the phone a bunch and hang it up a bunch to answer another call.
“Every single call was like, this might be it. I might be getting picked.”
That call never did come.
Ingold looked around the room at family, friends and what he estimated was half the village of Suamico. He had wanted nothing more than to make them proud and prove them right for helping him chase his dream.
But, hey, at least Ingold had a sales development job with Oracle lined up for that summer.
Six years later, they still are waiting for him to show up.
The final day of the draft ended with Ingold agreeing to a contract with the Oakland Raiders — now playing in Las Vegas — and joining future Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs as part of the Raiders’ 2019 rookie class.
The average NFL career lasts just more than three seasons.
Ingold is preparing for his seventh year, has made a Pro Bowl and qualified for a pension.
Perhaps nobody should have doubted him, even when it might have seemed unlikely that he would last more than one training camp.
It’s difficult to measure the competitiveness and determination Ingold has had since he was kid, evident when he gutted out a bad left ankle injury to start at quarterback in a WIAA Division 1 semifinal playoff loss to Hartland Arrowhead in the final high school football game of his career in November 2014.
He was back for the wrestling season that winter, going 41-0 and becoming at the time Bay Port’s only state champion this century.
Ingold never would have guessed six years ago all the things he would have accomplished by now.
Mostly because every day, he was just trying to make it until the next one. He was not counting seasons. The amount of years he needed for a pension wasn’t on his mind.
He focused on how to make the 53-man roster by making every moment count.
Alec Ingold offers advice to undrafted rookies
There will be hundreds of players this weekend who find themselves where Ingold once did, waiting to either hear their name get called or for it to flash on the bottom of the television screen, only for it to never happen.
The NFL veteran can offer them some sound advice.
“You literally have no time to feel sorry for yourself,” Ingold said. “Start solving problems, start figuring out ways to improve, start your NFL journey however it needs to start. But you have got to start it. The worst mistake you can do is to feel sorry for yourself for not getting picked. The poor me, nobody has time for that.
“It’s OK. Any opportunity is an opportunity. Once you get that foot in the door, don’t give anybody a reason to kick you out of it. That’s a huge piece of life advice, honestly. Man, you get an opportunity, it doesn’t really matter what it looks like. You can play that comparison game and spend a ton of sideways energy all day, every day. But focusing on what you need to improve on, focusing on how to make the most of it, that’s the best use of your time.”
Ingold has overcome adversity not only before his career, but during it.
He tore an anterior cruciate ligament in a knee during his third season with the Raiders in 2021.
The team did not tender him a contract that offseason, and the first instinct was to feel fear about what was next.
That lasted a few seconds.
Ingold almost immediately shifted back to a mindset that no matter what happened, he would find success through that opportunity.
“A possibly career-defining knee injury like that, you are going to be scared for sure,” Ingold said. “But similar experiences allowed me to look back at the track record and say, ‘OK, we are going to figure this out no matter what.'”
A week after the Raiders let him go in March 2022, he signed with the Dolphins.
One year later, Ingold agreed to a three-year extension worth up to $17.2 million that made him the highest-paid fullback in the league. It was the same year he got married to his wife, Alexa.
Alec Ingold makes big impact off the field
As he prepares for another NFL season, Ingold’s work off the field might be even more impressive.
He has been named a Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year nominee three times for his community service.
Among his work includes a focus on empowerment and advocacy for foster care and adoption communities — Ingold was adopted by Pat and Chris Ingold when he was a child — along with developing a curriculum and training modules based on a book he wrote that details his experiences and lessons he learned through adversity.
It has been implemented in schools in Florida.
It’s not even half of what he has done or still will do, even after his playing career is completed.
“Football and athletics in general is a great vehicle to learn life’s most valuable lessons,” Ingold said. “It would be a shame to leave those lessons on a football field. Being able to create programming, create a foundation, create environments where we can replicate lessons learned on an NFL football field and replicate that and manufacture an environment for high school, college-aged kids, youth and foster care, adoption advocates, case workers. Anybody in life trying to be the best version of themselves.
“We get to use those metaphors and those lessons that we all watch on Sundays together on the couch, and we get to apply them in real life. That, to me, is extremely purposeful. It allows me to, as a football player, take a lot of pride in my work and walk the walk while we are talking the talk and trying to make the world a better place.”
