Hats off to quarterback Alex Tanney who is still gainfully employed in the NFL these days with a new option exercised by the New York Giants.
How is this newsworthy? I get it. You probably feel a bit silly that you even clicked the link to read this. After all, you’re likely doing well if you even remember the era known as Alex Tanney, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback.
But this afternoon I couldn’t help but smile and nod at seeing the news that the New York Giants had exercised their option on quarterback Alex Tanney for the 2020 season. 2020. That meant the trick shot quarterback, the one-time Scott Pioli signing who went undrafted nearly a decade ago, was somehow still gainfully employed in the NFL.
Good for him.
Tanney’s NFL journey began in 2012 when, on June 5, Pioli offered Tanney a very real professional football contract. He was known as a “trick shot” quarterback who earned several tryouts from NFL teams after putting monster numbers at Division III Monmouth (157 touchdowns) and putting out videos like this:
Why not take a flyer on a guy with a live arm and the ability to call his shots like this, right? It’s not surprising the Chiefs did when Matt Cassel was the starting option.
Unfortunately for Tanney, he would be placed on injured reserve before the season began and that was it. It would be easy to assume that Tanney would have been finished at that point. After all, there are only so many chances a player can get and he’d been passed over several times by teams already in the draft or in free agent workouts, but the Dallas Cowboys came calling one year later with another offer.
From there, he began to jump from practice squad to practice squad. He went from the Cowboys to the Cleveland Browns to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the Buffalo Bills to the Indianapolis Colts to the Tennessee Titans. It was there, in Nashville in 2015, that Tanney saw his first NFL action, completing 10 of 14 passes for 99 yards and 1 touchdown—a very solid showing, statistically speaking.
He would remain with the Titans until the 2018 offseason after which he was ultimately picked up by the New York Giants, which is where he’s been ever since. Tanney had one more throw this last year, in 2019, for a single yard and that’s been the complete extent of his NFL career.
For a player who has likely been forgotten by 95 percent of Chiefs Kingdom (or more) and who faced an uphill climb to ever play in the NFL in the first place, Tanney has put together an impressive career with an estimated $3,568,422 in earnings to date, per Spotrac.