There is a hierarchy that exists in an NFL locker room. It’s not based on a player’s race or position or playing experience, but rather the size of his paycheck.
The multimillionaire Pro Bowl player isn’t swapping stories and playing rounds of golf with a practice-squad player who makes the league minimum.
There is the occasional exception, though, and in the Redskins locker room that exception is outside linebacker Ryan Kerrigan.
“You’d expect him having all of the success he’s had, being taken where he was (in the draft), to be in that next kind of tier on the football team,” Redskins tight end Logan Paulsen says of the 2007 Central graduate. “… Ryan’s never really adhered to that. He’s always kind of branched out and been friendly to everybody.”
Kerrigan is fresh off a Pro Bowl appearance in only his second season in the league, yet the Purdue graduate still considers himself to be just another guy, and he prefers everyone treat him that way.
“That’s always the way I’ve been,” Kerrigan says. “I’ve never tried to stand out or have everybody look at me. I’ve never been one of those guys.”
That is obvious by the company Kerrigan keeps. His clique includes a reserve tight end in Paulsen and Tom Compton, a reserve tackle selected in the sixth round of the 2012 NFL Draft.
Those aren’t exactly the type of players who receive the celebrity treatment a first-round draft pick out of Purdue and Pro Bowl selection like Kerrigan warrants.
Paulsen was signed by the Redskins as an undrafted free agent in 2010. He was at the bottom of their pay scale, and he assumed Kerrigan would hang out with the multimillionaire in-crowd. He discovered as time went on that Kerrigan wasn’t part of that clique, and that the two players had more in common than the number of zeroes on each of their contracts would indicate.
“We started inviting him out, and the friendship just started growing from there,” Paulsen says. “We just kind of clicked, and then I got to know how good of a guy he was and what kind of person he was.”
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