Mr. Irrelevant: When One Touchdown Is Enough to Live Forever

In 2026, when the NFL Draft closed, the last name read out came with no applause. John Tuggle. An unknown running back, the 335th name called. The league gave him a mocking nickname — "Mr. Irrelevant." Four decades later, Paramount Pictures made a film about him, with David Corenswet in the lead, Jonathan Levine directing, Nick Santora writing, and a release date of December 25, right at Christmas.

At 64, I have watched enough cycles in the sports world to know that what makes a story survive time is rarely a number. When grey hair talks about football, don't rush to cover your ears — the fire is still burning. But this time, the fire isn't in the stats. It's somewhere else, and that is what's worth discussing.

Across 48 years covering world sport, I have reported on eight Olympic Games, eight World Cups and more transfer windows than I can count. I learned one thing: whenever Hollywood picks a sports story to film, it almost never picks it for what happened on the field. It picks it to fill an emotional gap the audience is craving. And John Tuggle's story fills a very particular gap.

Context: 16 games, one touchdown

John Tuggle was drafted by the New York Giants in 2026. He appeared in 16 games as a rookie and scored exactly one touchdown. In a 16-game NFL season, playing all 16 suggests he was a regular member of the active roster, not a bench or inactive-list figure. But one touchdown across that many appearances paints a modest role: rotational depth, special teams, the few minutes nobody remembers.

In 2026, Tuggle was diagnosed with cancer. In 2026, he died at just 25.

That is nearly the entire sporting data set of a human being. One season, one touchdown, one death far too early. And yet more than forty years later, "Mr. Irrelevant" is no longer a joke. It has become a cultural brand, a story Americans retell every time the draft comes around and the last name is called.

This film, with Corenswet in the lead, tells Tuggle's journey: overcoming expectations, his relationships with his coach, teammates and his love interest. Corenswet calls his character a symbol of resilience, optimism, love and the true meaning of success.

Sound familiar? It is the classic formula of the inspirational sports film. But one detail made me stop, and it sits exactly where nobody wants to look.

The Core: When one touchdown creates a legacy

Set emotion aside for a moment and look at the structure.

In the professional sports industry, a player's value is quantified almost entirely by statistical output. Touchdowns, yards, touches. For a running back, a career with exactly one touchdown is almost synonymous with being erased from collective memory the moment he retires. Thousands of players have passed through the NFL with similar records and vanished without a trace.

John Tuggle is a rare case where sporting product and cultural product split completely apart: he produced one touchdown and a four-decade legacy.

This is the point worth analysing. Tuggle's story is not built around achievement. It is built around a label. The very label "Mr. Irrelevant" — designed as a taunt — accidentally created a perfect narrative frame that the league itself could not control. The man ranked last is the only one among more than 300 names who is remembered. The players taken first, tenth, fiftieth — many of them no longer draw a mention. The man at the bottom became immortal.

I have seen this in many other sports. Young people look at transfermarkt; I look at a player's eyes when he walks onto the pitch. There are players whose stat sheet says nothing, yet the stands remember them for a single moment, a story, the way they got up after a collision. Sport runs on two parallel measuring systems: the system of data and the system of memory. The problem is that modern fans are taught to trust only the first.

With this film, Paramount is betting on the second. December 25 — right at Christmas — is a premium release corridor requiring a wide marketing campaign. Nobody picks that date for a small film. It is a commercial gamble: placing both a story and its fate into the most brutally competitive weekend of the year, where audiences must choose among dozens of big titles.

What is interesting is that Tuggle's story structure completely inverts the familiar sports-film motif. In a typical underdog film, the protagonist overcomes every obstacle to reach a peak — a final win, a title, a big contract. Here, in reality, Tuggle never became a star. He had no career-defining moment of brilliance. So the reward for the audience cannot be a triumph on the field; it must be something thematic — resilience, a redefinition of success, the meaning of a life even when that life is short and quiet.

For a film like this, emotional quality decides everything. There is no historic moment to lean on. No final to recreate. Only a young man, an illness, and a family.

The Contrarian Angle: What the label hides

This is where I must speak plainly, knowing some won't like it.

The "Mr. Irrelevant" story is loved because it lulls the public with a warm message: that the last position still has value, that the forgotten still shine, that sport is a place of fair opportunity. But the real structure of the NFL Draft says the opposite.

The "Mr. Irrelevant" position is not proof of fairness. It is the residue of a harsh sorting system, where hundreds of people are ranked by commercial value before they can prove anything at all.

Tuggle played 16 games and scored one touchdown — a fringe contribution, mostly on special teams. Strip away the emotional fog and it is the career of a marginal labourer: value in filling roster depth, absorbing hits, doing what nobody wants to do. NFL teams need such men, but they don't want to pay them much. The "irrelevant" label is how the system tells that person: you may be here, but don't forget your place.

I am not saying the film will lie. I am saying the moving story Hollywood tells may inadvertently hide a truth: the name John Tuggle only became valuable after he died. While he was alive, with one touchdown to his name, he was not yet a symbol of anything. He was a 25-year-old man with cancer, and that is the real tragedy — it needs no heroic layer added on top. People make films about the dead because their stories have closed, and because the living need a reason to believe some pain has meaning. That isn't wrong. It's just that when we call them legends, we are conveniently finishing the old label — this time a prettier one.

Someone once asked me whether it is too cruel to talk about a story like this in such terms. I answered: the opposite. If we only see Tuggle through the halo of a Christmas film, we inadvertently turn a person into a product. Only when we remember he was just a marginal player, a man ranked last by the system and taken by illness, do we truly respect him — as a human being, not as a symbol.

What to take away

I will still go to the cinema, or at least queue for a ticket, to support a story that must not be forgotten. Because in an era when every player is valued by his contract and every moment is converted into views, John Tuggle reminds us of something simple: a person's worth is not contained entirely in their stat sheet.

Rumour is wind, but I am old enough to know where the wind blows from. And the wind this time blows across a four-decade-old grave, carrying a single touchdown. What can we, as sports fans, learn from that? Perhaps this: don't wait until someone dies to acknowledge that they were here. And don't let a system that prices human beings decide who deserves to be remembered.