Cheesehead
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- Mar 19, 2019
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GREEN BAY – Mike Pettine had to do a double-take at first when the list of the Packers' upcoming workouts was placed in front of the team's third-year defensive coordinator last month.
"I was like, 'Is that, is that the Billy Winn? The same Billy Winn that I know?'" Pettine recalled on Thursday.
That Billy Winn was the veteran defensive lineman who played three seasons for Cleveland, a stretch that included Pettine's first year as the Browns' head coach in 2014.
That Billy Winn also happens to be the same one whose NFL career was brought to a halt due to season-ending knee and triceps injuries, both suffered in preseason openers, that sidelined him for the 2017 and 2019 seasons, respectively.
While thumbing through sports administration jobs on the West Coast, Winn kept working out this offseason in hopes of getting one more call from the NFL – finally resulting in a September summons from Green Bay that turned out to be his ticket back.
The Packers signed Winn to their practice squad on Sept. 16 and elevated him to the game-day roster for the Week 3 trip to New Orleans. When he took the field at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, it officially had been 1,365 days since he played in his last regular-season game with Denver on Jan. 1, 2017.
Following another of elevation to the game-day roster, Winn cemented his comeback last Saturday when Green Bay promoted the 31-year-old defensive lineman to its active roster.
"It was incredible," said Winn on Thursday. "The emotions were so high because it's like, I trained my tail off since January and I wasn't sure if I was going to get a call or not. I finally got the call from Green Bay, and I was just ecstatic. I was just so excited to represent someone, represent myself, and just being part of an organization that wins games."
The 6-foot-4, 305-pound defensive lineman went through a lot to get back to football's proving ground. Even prior to tearing his anterior cruciate ligament, Winn dealt with a season-long back injury in 2016 he jokingly refers to as "the epidural year."
The ACL tear sidelined him for nearly two years before re-signing with the Broncos prior to the 2019 season. In his first game back, the Pro Football Hall of Fame game against Atlanta, Winn torn his triceps muscle and went immediately back to injured reserve.
There were plenty of moments Winn considered giving up on a comeback. Maybe it was a sign he was meant to do something else. But his wife of three years, Brooke, kept things in perspective.
That's because more than a decade ago Brooke was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease in which a person's immune system attacks the body's own tissue and organs, including the heart, lungs, joints and kidneys. It's forced Brooke to endure a series of surgeries, including a 15-hour full hip replacement last year.
For that reason, while on the injured reserve, Winn participated in last year's "My Cause, My Cleats" initiative to raise awareness and money for The Lupus Foundation of America.