Most prospects spend the pre-draft process selling themselves. Jake Funk spent it scouting himself like the general managers who would decide his future.
That clear-eyed honesty runs through his whole career, a two-star recruit out of Damascus High in Maryland who scored a state-record 57 touchdowns as a senior, tore the ACL in his left knee twice at Maryland, and still heard his name called at No. 233 in the 2021 NFL Draft. He won a Super Bowl LVI ring as a rookie with the Rams, then spent parts of the next three seasons with six more organizations, the last of them the Jaguars.
Funk spoke with PFN’s Unguarded Access at Pro Athlete Community’s Accelerate Event in Phoenix, a multi-day conference designed to prepare players for their post-NFL careers.
How Jake Funk Scouted His Way From Two-Star Recruit to a Super Bowl Ring
Coming out of the 2020 pandemic-shortened season, Funk had two years of eligibility left and a decision to make. Instead of chasing another year of college production, he ran the numbers on himself the way a front office would.
“I tried to look at it from the lens of an NFL GM,” Funk said. “You have a running back who played well on special teams, had limited tape as a running back, but he was also a fifth-year senior. So he’s an older guy with two ACLs.”
The conclusion was unsentimental. Even a first-team All-Big Ten season, he figured, would not move his draft stock much given the injury history, and the bigger danger was a third major injury that ended everything. A conversation with his father settled it.
“Do you want to come back and be a great college running back?” Funk recalled him asking. “Or do you want to go play in the NFL and go make that happen?”
He bet on himself, ran well at his pro day despite no combine invite, and landed in a Rams locker room with Matthew Stafford, Aaron Donald and Jalen Ramsey. The belief caught up to the work. “The game starts moving a lot slower for you, and you’re like, wow, I can actually play at this level,” he said.
Inside the Journeyman Grind Jake Funk Lived Tuesday to Tuesday
The ring did not buy permanence. What came next was the version of the NFL fans rarely see, a life measured not by Sundays but by Tuesdays.
“Every Tuesday is a practice squad player’s nightmare,” Funk said. “Tuesdays are when they start making moves that could affect you. So every Tuesday, you’re just waiting, and you’re like, okay, I made it through Tuesday, I’m good for another week.”
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That meant hotels and Airbnbs, months away from the people he loved, and a relationship with now-wife Hannah Ann Sluss that ran on weekend visits and flights. It also sharpened what counted. Funk married Sluss in 2024, and the couple welcomed son Lucas in November.
With his playing days seemingly behind him, Funk has poured that same energy into what comes next, a lot of it through the Pro Athlete Community and co-founder Chip Paucek. He talks about how completely a player’s identity gets tied up in the sport, and how a room full of guys facing the same off-ramp makes the next move less lonely.
His own next move leans into recovery. Funk has started a nighttime wellness brand built around a magnesium cream, an idea he traces to watching Sluss’s evening routine and to a body that survived two knee reconstructions. Take care of the parts nobody films, the thinking goes, and you wake up better for it. Same lesson he learned scouting himself.
