Detroit Lions players want in on Olympic flag football: 'I'm going to get me a gold medal'
When David Blough first saw the news that flag football was being added to the Olympics in 2028, he hopped on his family’s text chain and fired off a message:
Hey Chris, Blough wrote to his brother-in-law, New England Patriots cornerback Christian Gonzalez. You be the defensive coordinator or head coach. I’ll run the offense.
Samantha and Melissa, he wrote to his wife and her sister, let’s get training.
Blough and his family have lived the Olympic experience before. Blough’s wife, Melissa Gonzalez, ran the 400-meter hurdles for Colombia at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
And two weeks ago, when the International Olympic Committee officially added five sports to the 2028 games in Los Angeles — baseball/softball, cricket, lacrosse and squash are the other new additions — he saw a chance for his family to chase gold again.
“The thought that went through my head was me and Christian Gonzalez could coach Colombia, or something of the sort,” Blough, a practice squad quarterback with the Detroit Lions, told the Free Press. “That was the first thought that went through my head.
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“I don’t know if I could get citizenship (to play) or not, but as a coach you don’t have to be a citizen of a country. But to make it a family thing, in my head, that was the first thought I had when I saw it. I was like, ‘ ’28, L.A., be a coach for Colombia, men and women.’”
The NFL has championed the addition of flag football to the Olympics as a way to help grow the game internationally, and NFL players have embraced the thought of playing for their country and pursuing a gold medal, though it remains to be seen if that will be allowed.
The Olympics are scheduled to run July 14-28 that summer, and football could be done before the start of most NFL training camps.
“If we can play? Oh, I’m going out there,” Lions safety Tracy Walker said. “I’m going to get me a gold medal, for sure. I’m going to lock up someone, for sure.”
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Flag football is inherently a different game than the one Walker and the rest of the NFL plays every week.
There is no tackling. Players pull a flag off their opponent’s belt to mark them down. And the Olympic version of the game, if it follows the International Federation of American Football rules, will be played five-on-five on 50-by-25-yard fields with restrictions on running the ball and rushing the passer.
Each team will have four downs to cross midfield and earn a new set of downs, and blocking and kicking are not allowed.
“I’d love to play,” Lions quarterback Jared Goff said. “I would imagine the quarterbacks in that are going to be extremely mobile, so I don’t know if I’d be the best fit for that. But yeah, I think I’d love to watch it.”
Goff took part in a modified version of flag football at the NFL Pro Bowl last year, and most NFL skill players grew up playing in flag, seven-on-seven or similar passing leagues.
Those experiences and the United States’ affinity for football should give the country a leg up on the rest of the world when it comes to winning gold in 2028. But Mexico beat the United States in the women’s gold medal game at the 2022 World Games and Lions safety Will Harris said he could see rugby nations like Australia and New Zealand competing at a high level.
“In Texas growing up, it was you had 4 seconds to throw the football,” Blough said. “In this it’s like they can rush you, so it’s a little bit different rules. But for me it was like, you have 4 seconds to throw the football. We can go out on Sunday and not have one snap where you get 4 seconds, that’s just the reality of how good pass rushers are in the league, so I think that’s the biggest difference is at least the quarterback’s vision is not impaired.”
Blough said a player like Lamar Jackson or Kyler Murray would make an ideal Olympic quarterback, a dual threat with a big arm who can evade blitzing defenders, and he and other Lions players said they can see NFL stars lining up for the chance to represent their country.
“Like LeBron James,” Harris said. “He’s a gold-medalist Olympian. How many people can say they were in the Olympics?”
Lions backup quarterback Hendon Hooker said he dreamed of being on the U.S. Olympic basketball team growing up and for that reason would jump at the chance to play flag football in the Olympics.
Several of Hooker’s NBA-playing friends have won gold medals at various levels of international competition, including Harry Giles of the Brooklyn Nets and Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat, and he would like the chance to add one to his trophy collection.
“It’s something special,” Hooker said. “Especially coming from a former basketball player who plays football now at a high level, it’s definitely something very special.”
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Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs said he would “love to get a gold medal” if given the chance, while receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown — who could represent the U.S. or Germany, where his mother was born — said the realities of having a long, physical NFL season and the contractual obligations of playing football for a living may deter him and others from pursuing the Olympics.
“That’d be cool, but like I said, we have a long season,” he said. “I’m not trying to get hurt out there in the Olympics. I don’t know how that works with your contract. We’ll see when we cross that bridge.”
For Blough, the bridge feels like it’s there to be crossed now.
He figured he and his brother-in-law, with their NFL ties, could help Colombia build a flag football powerhouse, and then he saw highlights of the European women’s flag football championship and realized, “We’re behind a little bit.”
Participating in the Olympics as a player or coach, Blough said, would be a “really cool” experience that would tie together family, country and his love for football, and perhaps start him down his post-playing career path.
“I think we give off this big schtick of like we think the NFL’s the biggest, the baddest, but the NBA guys, you see how special it is when they get to go and represent their country and put on USA colors, or Dirk plays for Germany, like St. Brown could play as a German-American,” Blough said. “You could play for your country or your parents and represent a whole nother (country) and I think that would be an awesome opportunity for a lot of these guys to just kind of get into where their family came from, who are in the league now.
“(Melissa) grew up in Texas, but she’s representing her family. And the reality is that there’s going to be 21 spots on the USA team and there’s 2,000 NFL players, so if you don’t make the USA Team … you go and represent your country and do something for your parents or whoever and make that special. And it’s something you’ll have forever.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.
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Matchup: Lions (5-2) vs. Las Vegas (3-4).
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Line: Lions by 7½.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Flag football is coming to the Olympics: Detroit Lions want in on team
