What Happened to That Guy? Matt Stover

The former Ravens kicker was smart with his money and now consults athletes through the Players Philanthropy Fund.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Greetings and welcome to What Happened to That Guy? A
Ravens podcast about former players and life after football. I'm
your host, John Eisenberg. When I interview guys for this podcast,
I usually start by asking if they thought much at
all about life after football while they were playing. Some
say yes, some say no. But I didn't have to

(00:25):
ask Matt Stover, the Ravens superb placekicker for their first
thirteen seasons in Baltimore. When his career ended, he was
a forty two year old father of three. If he
hadn't thought about life after football by then, he was
in trouble. But of course he had. Anyone who knows

(00:46):
Stover knows that the methodical, meticulous, uber prepared Stover was
planning for life after football when he was twenty three
and kicking for the Cleveland Browns in the early nineteen nineties.
Years later, there was a ninety nine percent chance, shoot
a hundred percent chance, that he would have things set

(01:08):
up as his career wound down. As I learned in
our recent conversation for this podcast, by the end, he'd
already made a major financial score, quietly cashing in big
on an investment. Yes, while he was still kicking for
the Ravens, and out of that financial score came the
central piece of his post football career. His business, The

(01:31):
Player's Philanthropy Fund, a nonprofit that helps athletes with their
charitable giving. The seed fort was already planted in Stover's
mind when his playing career ended. What happened to that guy?
Stover stayed in Baltimore to run that business and raise
his family. He became a lacrosse dad with an office

(01:51):
in Towson. How local is that? And he's still well
known around town. But I decided to do a podcast
episode with him anyway, guessing he'd have plenty to say
about life after football, and he did, especially on the
subject of players and money. That's exactly what Stover was
as a kicker. By the way, money. You may not

(02:13):
realize it, but he retired as the fourth highest scorer
in NFL history, having converted four hundred and seventy one
field goals and amassed two thousand and four points astronomical
totals compiled mostly with the Ravens, But success like that
was impossible to envision when he was starting out in

(02:33):
pro ball. The New York Giants drafted him in nineteen
ninety out of Louisiana Tech. He was a twelfth round pick,
not overly desired, and he spent his rookie season uninjured reserve.
Then he jumped to the Browns, but he was never
confident his career would last long. The Browns coach was
a surly young guy named Bill Belichick, who, less to say,

(02:56):
was not one to hand out praise and promised good
days ahead. Fearing the worst, stover spent multiple off seasons
interning at the International Management Group I am G, a
powerhouse sports agency based in Cleveland. I was going to
be an agent. I was going to be a marketing guy.
I was going to be a financial advisor. I didn't

(03:17):
know what I wanted to do, but I know I
needed to get to know people who did it. Relationships
as you know, what matters, and so I entrenched myself,
got a lot of business cards and did some shlt work.
You know, I was willing to go through files and
wanting to sit down and you know, could get my
brain picked by them and sit down and ask questions

(03:37):
for financial advisors or whomever. Just to get entrenched in
the community. And even when the Cleveland Grand Prix got there,
I was trying to sell had passes and advertising for
for the Cleveland Grand Prix. He signed a contract extension
with the Browns in nineteen ninety five, just before the
franchise came to Baltimore. The early Ravens were a work

(03:57):
in progress on many fronts, but not a kicker. Stover
had converted twenty nine of thirty three field goal attempts
in his last year in Cleveland. In nineteen ninety nine,
he hit twenty eight of thirty three for the Ravens.
The next year, he hit thirty five of thirty nine
on a Super Bowl winning team. He nailed a long
and important one in the Super Bowl. And the Ravens

(04:19):
are going to attempt about a forty seven yard field
goal attempt from the left hash. Stover on the year
thirty five of thirty nine completed the converted fifty three
of his last fifty seven. Kyle Richardson the hold from
the left hash, the snap, the spot that kicks up
plenty of leg and it is good. Matt Stover gives

(04:43):
the Ravens a little cushion with a forty seven yard
field goal. Stover led the league with thirty five field
goals and led all kickers with one hundred and thirty
five points. He has been a valuable, valuable Raven and
he makes it a tend nothing league. And that's why
he's going to the Pro Bowl. With those kind of
clutch kicks, a big one like that forty seven yards.

(05:04):
I mean to tell you, this is a great kick
into the wind. To Scott Brian Bill, a coach that
Super Bowl team, I spoke to Brian about Stover, who
finished a distant second to Justin Tucker as the kicker
on the Ravens All Time team as voted on by
Baltimore fans in the summer of twenty twenty. They did
the all time team here, and of course Justin Tucker

(05:27):
won in the landslide. And what I can't believe is
that there are times when I have to sort of
explain to people how good Matt Stover was. Yeah, and
particularly given the style of play that we had, you know,
dominated by defense. You know, those Steel girls were huge.
And I'm with you, of course, memory stage, I get that,

(05:50):
and not that Justin isn't a big part of what
they're doing. I don't discount that. I mean, he's a
magnificent kicker, but I think you could make a real
case that Matt had a bigger role, Were Wars more
pivotal something because of the way that we played and
scoring in the whole nine yards And he was just
so consistent and for so long. Even as his career soared, though,

(06:12):
Stover was still concerned about what might happen to him
when he was through with football. I was always reading,
trying to figure out, you know, the economy to markets,
you know, stocks bombs, creating you a good asset based
for myself so that if my career did come to
an end, John, that I understood how much money I
would need to go out and make in order to

(06:32):
the same standard living. He was the adult in the
Ravens locker room, the union representative who understood collective bargaining
and long term financial planning. When his teammates needed advice
on what to do with their money, they came to him.
His advice was simple, save, save, save, And one of

(06:55):
the things I always trying to tell guys when I
was in the locker room, Hey, can we agree that
a hundred thousand dollars with a lot of mine? And
they were looking at me like, yeah, it's a lot
of money. I said, now here's the next question. There's
a lot of money over a lifetime. And they're looking
they're like, no, I said, exactly, that's how you need
to think, because you're going to be a young man
when you're done with this game, a real young man.

(07:18):
So you'd better understand how many hundreds of thousands of
dollars you're going to need the last a lifetime. I
remember when our team was not investing in the full
one k. I mean, you put in, you put in
ten thousand, You got an extra twenty thousand if you
put it in right. So the NFL with two for one,
and our guys weren't doing it because they wanted their
money and they wanted it now. They didn't want to
have to wait for it. I have looked at them,

(07:39):
I said, you a bunch of idiots. I said, you
get an immediate two for one and you're not paying
taxes all that money. If this is the best money
you can possibly invest, you know. And I still have
guys coming up to me today and say, still, thanks
so much for telling me I was crazy enough to
do it, because that's the only money I've got left.
By the early two thousands, he'd been in the NFL

(08:01):
for more than a decade and signed several nice contracts.
It was no longer a matter of making sure he
had enough money if his career suddenly ended. Well, after
fourteen years in the NFL, my wife and I had
enough assets to where we were given an opportunity to
put some of our funds to risk. A friend of
mine had created an online marketing tool called credit Card

(08:24):
Application Center dot com. And so what he was doing
he figured out how to bring credit card applications into
his domain and then market market credit cards for banks. Well,
he created it, and I helped people with a little
bit of money here and there, and then he and

(08:45):
I were close and we decided, you know what, where
the leader with a really bad name called credit Card
Application Center dot com, Why don't we go by the
name credit cards dot com, credit card all the things
around it. And the purchase of the domain alone was
two point seven five million dollars. So my wife and

(09:06):
I went in with him and another partner and we
purchased that domain name and we absolutely crushed it with
him about you know, eighteen to twenty four months. It
was a game changer, and we had um, you know,
we grew the assets tenfolds, and this is why I'm
playing too, by the way. And I was making more

(09:28):
money at the time with my quarterly checks from the
business than I wasn't playing football, So it was kind
of funny. Nobody knew it in the locker room. Might
be Benner to keep it quiet. It was really good, yeah,
because I didn't want to. He wouldn't need it. Hill
was something him, so so I was kicking really well too.

(09:52):
You know, I can giggle like that, but and this
is not I'm not coming to you from a very
from a cocky position at all. It's just it's humbling
that I was put in this position, and it was,
you know how, I'm a Christian guy. It was all
God led and I'm not that smart. Getting into the
credit card investment was smart, but getting out when he

(10:13):
did was really smart. The year was two thousand and six.
It seemed America was riding high, but an economic crash
was on the horizon. Stover and his partners recognized that
the good times might end soon, so they sold a
company that was a huge cell event, and I got

(10:33):
some tremendous counsel onto how to receive those funds from
the cell of the company to be able to not
only create more wealth for me and my family and
my children through trusts and those types of things, but
also through the giving piece I was given advised by
Emil Colleen, a Coleena Associates, was actually in Pausing and
he's one of the most four thinteen charable planning attorneys

(10:58):
in the country. And he's in and he was in
my Bible study. Amial Collina told Stover that the smart
thing to do was put a percentage of his proceeds
from the sale into a donor advised fund, which is
what you ask. It's a financial instrument that brokerages and
financial institutions offer, basically a charitable giving account that you

(11:21):
operate under their umbrella. And what's key, if you take
income and put it in there, the income does not
get taxed. Stover's eyes grew wide when he heard that
the funds go in there, they're years to direct along
as it goes to another five or one see three
qualified cherry and I gave away a whole opul money.

(11:42):
If I did it that way, then if I would
have received pay taxes and then gave it away, And
I said wow. I started operating within this donor by
funds and saw how simple it was for me to
go online, request the check to be paid to Louisiana,
tacked to my church, to any other to qualified nonprofit,
and this donor by the fund with send the funds

(12:04):
to those institutions. I had that ability, and man, let
me tell you, it was something I said, man, players, athletes,
women and men should have access to the simplicity of
giving away fund. Stover liked the process so much that
he and a partner decided to open their own donor
advised fund and attract clients who wanted to run their

(12:27):
charitable giving through an account with Stover's organization, which he
called the Player's Philanthropy Fund, because his idea was to
work with athletes who'd come into money and wanted to
give some away to help various causes. I'm a back
him on the back office, Ed Reid first class. He
without stacking. We've crushed it for it. So the Ed read,

(12:49):
you know the high of the Hurricane Foundation to actually
an account and side of the Player's Slaty Fund. We're
now a two hundred accounts just within the Player's Lackey Fund,
and we're bringing on our biggest petitor, because more and
more people are understanding what we're doing, the COVID thing.
People would call us and they would want to set
up an account. We can have an account set up

(13:10):
in a date. They are a nonprofit in a day
instead of waiting and filing with the IRS. They call us,
We sponsor them and then they go out and do
their funds for ppees or for helping people that are
out of work or whatever. There is food, those type
of things. We've been assisting people in them and we
can help them do that extremely clickly since you've brought

(13:32):
it up, you know, the COVID. It's such a such
a tough time for so many people. There are people
in position to help, and I'm just curious as to
what you're saying. In terms of giving. It's been fantastic.
There's a ton of people out there that want to help,
giving back fround. Just last week we see the three
point eight million dollar contribution to one of their COVID

(13:52):
accounts because they are purchasing tablets for those who cannot
be their loved ones when they're passing away. Both are
the things that are going on and our communities are
are rallying, and that's what it's take for all of
us to really get out of this mass. Is not
only you know, having the markets open back up, our
communities coming closer together and creating the resources. This is

(14:17):
one way to create resources. Players are supposed to learn
from their coaches in the NFL, but Brian Billick told
me those roles were reversed when he came to Baltimore
and started coaching Stover. Matt helped me learn how to
coach in or at least how to be his head coach.
He was huge with that. They're very patient with me

(14:38):
and taught me a lot. I mean, just in terms
of what it takes to prepare to be a good
kicker and stuff like that, or just the fact that
it's different. And Matt was very very professional, great work ethic,
but it's a difference. They just are. They don't train
the same, they don't work out the same, and when
you don't have any familiarity with that, which I didn't,

(14:59):
Matt and I ruggle actually early, but he was very
much man about it because we got to find a
way to work together here because I just I kind
of treat them like every player out of a coach.
Needless to say, they worked it out. Matt He is
one of my all times favorite and it's always been
in my Ravens time. It's probably the one that I've
interacted with and he's reached out on a complications and

(15:22):
probably more so than any other players. You're familiar with
what he's doing with the players, philanthropy, fundissum and sort
of helping them direct their terrible giving basically exactly right.
And because they do get caught up in so many
different directions and that's again typical Matt. He very much
wants to get back. And you know, because kickers have
a different relationship with players, they do, I mean, the

(15:43):
players look at them differently. Tony Sarah Goose used to
be merciless on Matt in practicing games and whatever matches took,
you know, because that was Tony, but match like all kickers,
there's just an interesting guy and very interesting in the
way his career went, you know, it's just so professional
and so precise. He knew he would have a long career.

(16:05):
Stover last kicked for the Ravens in two thousand and eight.
John Harbaugh's first season as their head coach was Stover's
last in Baltimore, his contract was not renewed, and he
was out of the NFL for a few months until
the Indianapolis Colts needed a kicker and signed him during
the two thousand and nine season. Stover's last game was
Super Bowl forty four, in which the Colts lost to

(16:26):
the New Orleans Saints. After that, finally he was done
playing football, but not done learning important lessons. When I
left the league, I had a particular mindset of how
I wanted that to look. Players ran Fund was a fledgeling.
We weretisticating going. It was so difficult to compete against
the current owner Vice Fund market that's out there. That

(16:47):
was tough. I worked for Key Row and a few
other companies for my public speaking. I had a book
in line, and the next thing, you know, my family
and you know here I'm this Ipai personality, and my
family began to up for a little bit, and I said,
you don't want I better be real careful here because
you need to kind of find yourself, be a little
bit more patient with not just jumping into anything so

(17:10):
something else. There's some players that you know that did
step out quickly went right into work and they find
themselves within a year or two going I'm not doing
this anymore, and you know, someone more Ravens and high
profile Ravens and extremely bright Ravens. You know what, I'm
brought in out right without paying names, and they just said, no,

(17:31):
I'm not doing that. So I was told to be
very careful with doing that. I had the ability financially
to be able to be patient, and I would say
that that a lot of it has to do with
that financial pressure. Where are you when you leave the game?
How much do you have saved? How much more money
do you make to keep your current standard living? And

(17:51):
then what am I going to do in order to
do that? That's typically the case because most guys don't
play as long as I did, and they don't make
enough money. I don't think about the percent of the
league makes enough money, you know, to really be set
for life. If that that is amazing, just ten percent,
oh yeah, and in the top one percent, you know,
those are the Peyton Manning's and the Jill Flaccos and

(18:13):
the Ray Lewis's. The other nine percent of that first
ten percent are very well paid, but they're lost of
the top one percent, And so realize that magi percent
of the league is just a good start, uh, And
people say, well, gouy, you know, I love you know,
love to have it exactly. And if a player comes
in thinking that it's just going to be a good

(18:33):
start in life, it's not a means to an end,
and he'll budget properly, he won't spend his money crazily,
and he'll understand if this is going to be just
you know, be twenty five, twenty six, arms um. If
it goes for it doesn't map and it's all bonus money.
And that's that they're good. I remember that if you
make it one year in the NFL, your average goes
to six. If you make it less than one year,

(18:55):
then everybody's average is less than four. So it's the
one year that you're at during those are the guys
you take. So it's really about a six year average
that you say in the NFL. How prevalent do you
think is the understanding of that? You know amongst the
playing population. We'll tell you the NFL does a great
job of helping you understand that. If you're willing to

(19:17):
listen and learn, A third league listens and does something
about it. Another third league listens and does nothing about it,
and another third league doesn't even listen. Okay, and I've
seen that time and time again. So about a third
year locker room is smart enough to realize those type
of things, not that the others aren't smart enough, they're
just willing to act on it. And the reality of

(19:41):
what you're in. Just because you made it into the
NFL that first year doesn't mean that you're set, not
even close. And most people think, well, you made it.
You know, you got drafted and you're set through what. No,
ye're not, not even as a first round draft that
I feel like you have something to offer other players
with that advice, because you're not the first person to

(20:02):
tell me that. I mean, Peter Bullware told me. And
this is a guy who has his act together. He said,
the first year out was a struggle, and you know
it was. You know what am I doing? The noise
is gone, the crowds are gone, the adulation's gone, and
that's fine. It's just a jolt, you know, how do
you adjust to that? I'm not sure fans understand it's
a real adjustment. It is. Our identity has been part

(20:26):
of this game since that was the first grade I
was a football player, you know, and I ended up
being a kicker. But I was a football player growing up,
and and heck, I was forty two when I walked
away from the game, and I was told, that's gonna
be hard. It is an identity issue. I mean, you're
going through a death, you know, a part of you
is dying. Football is a young man's game, no question.

(20:51):
But if you last as long as Stover did, you
really benefit and not just because you keep making football money.
You grow old and wise with experience. You gain a
perspective that enables you to deal with the tricky end
of career and start of the rest of your life. Stuff.
Play Matthews, the dad, you know, here's the teammate of mine.
We were talking after he was done playing. You used

(21:12):
to have this Nike contract. You said, you know where
my Nike contract is now the sporting Goods. That's what
mine is. And I just laugh. I said, you know what,
You're right, You're right, that's so true, because it's all
that goes. And but I had time, at the age
of forty two to decipher that, to deal with that

(21:33):
piece and to understand fully fully the privilege it is
to play in the NFL, it is a privilege, and
if you approach it like that and the gratitude you
had for that opportunity, then when you are done with it,
you don't have any bitterness. Few would have blamed Stover
for feeling bitter about his departure from the Ravens after

(21:54):
the two thousand and eighth season. All good things come
to an end. He wasn't happy with how it was handled,
and that could have colored his post football relationship with
the organization. Instead, Stover basically just moved on. Let bygones
be bygones. When the Ravens put him in the Ring
of Honor in twenty eleven, he addressed the fans directly,

(22:16):
more than anything, I can tell you, that has been
a privilege to be here with you, and it's been
a privilege to serve you as a player out there
on this field, so much so that I even chose
to live here when my career was done. Awesome. Yes,
it was a happy ending, and Stover is well aware
those can be rare because so many players carry some

(22:38):
bitterness into their post football lives because of some incident
or development late in their careers, an injury, coaching change,
a coach that didn't like it, one bad play right,
those type of things, and it was always a battle
for me. It was just always a battle, and he
just had to gain their trust as soon as much

(23:01):
as you can. And well how they perceived you as
your new reality and you had to deal with that,
and I think that's life in general. So I did
my best, and I have no regret looking back, and
you know, worked extremely hard and I tried to play
with excellent but I try to be the best teammate
I possibly could be, and I hope that's the legacy

(23:21):
I left more than anything, is that my teammates sought
me as a good teammate and I was willing to
do whatever I needed to to see that teammate on
and off of you. You can find out more about
Stover's career at Baltimore Ravens dot Com slash what Happened
to That Guy. I'd like to thank him for speaking

(23:42):
to me. Another episode of What Happened to That Guy
will drop in two weeks and they'll keep coming every
other week for the rest of the twenty twenty season.
If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe so you
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This podcast is part of the Bold More Ravens podcast Network,
which also includes The Lounge hosted by Ryan Mink and

(24:06):
Garrett Downing, and new this year, Black in the NFL
hosted by my colleague Clifton Brown. Wherever you get your podcasts,
just search for the Baltimore Ravens Podcast Network and everything
will come up. Good stuff all around. This is John Eisenberg.
I'll talk to you in two weeks.