Every story written about Ty Montgomery’s upbringing has used the same number for nearly a decade. Seventeen foster siblings. The figure shows up in ESPN’s reporting, in FOX6 Milwaukee features, on the Patriots team site, even on his current Next Legacy Partners bio. Montgomery says the real total is over 20.
The former Packers, Ravens, Jets, Saints, and Patriots running back sat down with PFN’s Unguarded Access for one of his most candid interviews since retiring in 2024. The interview took place at Pro Athlete Community’s Accelerate Event in Phoenix, a multi-day conference designed to prepare players for their post-NFL careers.
Ty Montgomery’s Foster Family and the ‘Love Line’ Behind 20-Plus Siblings
Lisa Montgomery started fostering after Ty, then in third grade, told her he wanted brothers. What began with a boy named Lee turned into a rotating family that defined his childhood and still shapes his work today.
“My mom told me it’s really over 20,” Montgomery said of the sibling count. “But that just seemed like a number that was easy for everyone to wrap their brains around.”
He pushes back on the system’s language whenever he can. “Even though we don’t have a bloodline, we have a love line,” Montgomery said. “Their kids are my nieces and nephews, my kids are their nieces and nephews, their family is my family.”
The mission has carried into his post-playing years. Montgomery sits on the board of Connections Homes, a nonprofit that pairs foster youth aging out of the system with lifelong mentoring families. Under the program’s model, the youth themselves decide who they want to live with.
“For the first time in their life, they get a choice on who they want to live with and who they want to be their family,” Montgomery said.
He also helped fund an 11-person trip to Israel for former foster youth. Many of the kids had never been on a plane. Montgomery couldn’t go himself because he was in New England for practices with the Patriots.
However, a letter that came back after the trip reframed the work for him.
“She literally said in the letter that she was so grateful that this was happening because she didn’t think that she was worthy of something like this,” Montgomery said while trying not to get emotional. “I had no idea that’s the level of impact that I was making.”
Next Legacy Partners, NFL Flag Football, and Ty Montgomery’s Next Move
Montgomery’s life after football runs on three tracks, and the most visible is Next Legacy Partners. The Silicon Valley venture firm was named on March 30 as one of the strategic investors in the NFL’s new professional flag football league with TMRW Sports.
The portfolio sprawls. “One day it might be a voice AI company,” Montgomery said. “The next day it might be a flag football deal. The next day it might be a health tech company. The next day it might be defense tech company.”
The second track is faith, which Montgomery ties directly to staying upright through nine NFL seasons.
“Without my faith, I know I’d be a different man,” he said. “There’s too much access as a professional athlete. It’d be so much easier to make a lot of other choices, a lot of bad choices.”
“What keeps me there is my faith in the fact that I know I have to serve the Lord and I have to answer to him before anyone else. I even tell my wife this, like I love God and I fear God more than I love and I fear you. So, I’m always going to choose to serve God, and God’s going to come first, even before my wife. And my wife understands that about me. Um, but I think that’s one of the things my wife loves about me because she knows what comes with that is a certain type of man and a heart that I’m striving to carry every single day”.
The third track arrives soon. Montgomery confirmed he’s in talks with publishers on a children’s book he wrote seven years ago, before his now seven-year-old son was born. He realized later he’d written it for himself too.
“Everything I told him I wanted to hear or I wanted to know or I wanted to be confident in,” Montgomery said. “I think it’s one of those books that anyone could benefit from.”
The publisher hasn’t been announced. The release date isn’t set. But after a decade of the same headline number following him around, Montgomery seems ready to write the next one himself.
