People say I'm arrogant or cocky. You know what it is? I feel that I have a good chance to win ball games.
I have a very small sample size: 2-0 to start my NFL career. Talking a lot of smack. And then I walk into Kansas City and put up the worst football game of my existence. And I've always been this brash, arrogant kind of guy.
When people ask where I'm from, I tell them Washington, because that's where I feel the most comforted by the people.
I was a talented egomaniac with a self-esteem problem.
A lot of times people say they want a fresh start, but you can't really have a fresh start because it doesn't happen that way.
I was fighting a war on two fronts. I was fighting the best defenses in professional football and I was fighting the media. At that level you just cannot do that. You just cannot do it. I couldn't stop it, and I didn't try to stop it.
I had always been a quick healer.
When playing football became a job, it lost its luster for me.
I do follow the NFL. It took me a while to get back into it, but I do follow it religiously now. Huge Packers and Steelers fan.
When I bought my first house I had all these red flags on my credit report because I bounced a bunch of checks to places like Pizza Hut and stuff like that for $13 or $15 because I was trying to feed my O-linemen.
When I retired, I took my money from the financial planner and proceeded to present the front that everything was fine. I had to pretend I still made $5 million a year.
People don't understand that if I would have stayed in Tampa, I might have disappeared and people would have forgotten about me. That may be good in some ways, but not in others.
There was a joke going around campus when I was at Washington State. It went, 'What's the difference between God and Ryan Leaf?' The punchline was, 'God doesn't think he's Ryan Leaf.'
