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Michael Rothstein, ESPN Staff Writer
Brandon Copeland, who played for six teams across 10 seasons in the NFL, is retiring, he told ESPN on Monday.
The 32-year-old free agent linebacker went undrafted out of Penn in 2013. After stints on the practice squads of the Baltimore Ravens and Tennessee Titans in 2013 and ’14, he made the 53-man roster of the Detroit Lions in 2015 and played there until 2017.
Copeland then played two years with the New York Jets and then a year each with the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons. Last season, he played three games with his hometown Ravens.
“It’s time,” Copeland said. “One of the pieces of advice I got from my granddad, going into my rookie year in the NFL, we sat down and did an interview and somebody said — because he was a Baltimore Colt and I was a Baltimore Raven — they asked what advice would you give to your grandson as he enters the NFL?
“And he said, ‘If I could tell him anything, if I could do anything different, it would be don’t play as long.'”
Roy Hilton, Copeland’s grandfather, played in 151 games for the Baltimore Colts, New York Giants and Falcons from 1965 to ’75.
Copeland said that advice remained in his mind throughout the final years of his career, especially as he had three surgeries on his knees and tore both his pectoral muscles. He joked toward the end that it was like, “I’m Tin Man out there, trying to keep everything together from falling apart and, at a certain point, you got to know.”
During his stint with the Ravens last season, he said he recognized it was probably time to walk away.
Copeland played in 85 career games with 21 starts, making 163 tackles with eight sacks, two forced fumbles and six passes defended.
Copeland, who declined to divulge his post-football plans, has been involved in off-field work throughout his career, including teaching a course in financial literacy at Penn since 2019. He worked for an offseason as an analyst at an investment firm, was a contributing editor for Kiplinger’s for two years and was a real estate investor last year on the Netflix show “Buy My House.”