Matthew Slater is everything that’s good about football

After 16 years and 264 games, one of the greatest ever Patriots has announced his retirement from the NFL.

Matthew Slater, who announced his retirement on Tuesday and spent his entire 16-year career playing for the New England Patriots, is quite possibly the only player in existence to which all three of the following apply:

1. The accolades: five first-team All-Pros, three second-team All-Pros, 10 Pro Bowls, the Bart Starr Award, and the Art Rooney Award, not to mention there Super Bowl wins — tells you all you need to know
2. His Pro Football Reference stat page looks like an intern accidentally hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and
3. Both of the above statements only make sense if you were lucky enough to be born at the exact point in time to watch Slater play the game of football.

Maybe this will help make the point another way; I promise that I didn’t make this up and/or just change the article photo myself.

When you look up “Gunner (American football)” on Wikipedia, the special teams position that Slater plays where your primary responsibility is to haul ass down the field at ~20mph speed and hit the returner in the mouth before they have a chance to accumulate return yards, the lead photo is… Matthew Slater.

And that’s before we even get to the intangibles, the locker room glue, the “I want to be like that guy when I grow up,” the unofficial team chaplain in the good times and the bad, that Slater delivered so many times over that if life was a Super Nintendo RPG, you’d wonder if he used all of his skill points on Charisma and figured “eh, we’ll just let the rest of the chips fall where they may and figure it out later”.

Much like his fellow Patriots GOAT Tom Brady, Slater almost didn’t get drafted at all, despite his dad Jackie already being a Pro Football Hall of Famer for almost a decade when Matthew was on the board in the 2008 draft. Slater was decently fast, clocking a 4.44-second 40 yard dash, but his 3-cone was between a half and almost a full second between hey-where’d-he-go matchup nightmares like Deion Branch and Julian Edelman. So, a traditional wide receiver role that required him to do anything beyond backyard football “go deep” routes probably wasn’t happening.

Fortunately, with a true special teams pervert enthusiast like Bill Belichick running the ship, it only took Slater there seasons to level up from gadget guy and part-time kick returner to a team captain in 2011 that regularly pushed 20 special teams tackles a season. Slater’s speed, paired up with his obsessive work ethic (sound familiar?) and professor-level intelligence turned him into the guy a kick returner feared the most – not because he was about to crack your ribs with a full-speed body slam, but because he was liable to get you cut if you dared to take the ball out and actually ended up losing 5 yards on the play.

Like this!

The 2011 season that ultimately ended in a recurring nightmare for the New England Patriots marked Slater’s first of eight straight (!) Pro Bowls, his first All-Pro honor, a handful of games started at safety, that 46-yard bomb from Tom Brady that we all see online every once in a while (which ended up being Matt’s only NFL catch), and the kind of reputation that put him on the short list of special teams players even casuals might know.

He may have never been destined for a life as a bona fide NFL wide receiver, but with returning and covering kicks in his toolbox, not to mention the occasional defensive series, he was destined for just about every other part of the game.

Like all three minutes of Taylor’s video above can confirm, Matthew Slater had become Bill Belichick’s not-so-secret weapon in the phase of the game that most NFL teams seem to treat like Madden, and the yards he stole from our enemies time and time again pinned them inside an awkward distance from their own end zone. Especially if you remember the pass defense of the early 2010s Pats, even when the offense was cooking with gas, every edge that the Patriots could get in the forgotten phase of the game was at a premium.

And between making the splash plays on his own and bringing up players like Nate Ebner and Brandon King that’d also go on to make their bacon on special teams in the ways of the Force, Matthew Slater went from a notable guy on some really good teams to a local institution. The kind of guy you’d mention alongside guys like Tedy Bruschi and Ty Law, except that Slater was borderline great enough to make even playing special teams seem cool.

And speaking of Tedy Bruschi, a small bit of the smorgasbord of clips the Patriots posted on Twitter on Tuesday had Tedy chuckling, acknowledging the passing of the torch of locker room leader. But not in a copy/paste, surely-this’ll-hit-just-the-same-when-I-do-it style.

People latch on to authenticity and honesty. They feed off it. Guys want to compete even harder for someone they know cares about them and is going balls out, every snap, doing their job. It can’t be faked, though. You try to do this too hard, and you end up as Russell Wilson.

Even though he had barely signed his second contract by the time he was voted as a Captain for the second time in 2012, though, authenticity and genuine confidence in the men around him were in Slater’s toolbox from the start. By the time Matthew finally tasted Super Bowl victory in Super Bowl XLIX, he had also made four straight Pro Bowls and earned his third first-team All-Pro nomination.

And by 2016, in addition to a few more Pro Bowls, he also locked up an award that probably means even more to him than any of the on-field honors: the Bart Starr Award, which he got right before the famous 28-3 postseason.

If wholesome content is your jam, this throwback is as good as it gets:

Matthew Slater’s finest hour, though, came at the final moments of a grueling 2018 season when points were nowhere to be found and the greatest coach and quarterback of all time needed him the most. In the 2018 Super Bowl, Slater may have played the most electric game he’d ever play, flying around time and time again (there was plenty of punting that game, if you’ll recall) and ruining returners’ dreams of pulling a Devin Hester every single time.

I went deep on his unbelievable, leave-it-all-out-there performance at the time, and still maintain that if it wasn’t for Julian Edelman’s monstrous receiving game, Matthew would be given the Super Bowl MVP by anyone who was actually watching during the kicking game and wasn’t up getting more snacks.

And finally, even when Tom Brady had engineered his way out of town and Slater was going on his 12th NFL season, he would’ve been more than justified in hanging ‘em up. He had all the honors, all the awards, there Super Bowl rings, and an all-time spot on one of the greatest runs in the history of the sport. But he didn’t. Slater played for four more years, from 2020-2023, in his age 35, 36, 37, and 38 seasons, presumably not because he had to. Because he wanted to.

Because he loved the game and the New England Patriots enough that he kept signing on for one more year, one more campaign, one more shot at winning that next ring. When it became clear over the last few years that those days may have been gone forever, again, Slater could’ve easily called it a day and bailed.

But he didn’t. Matthew stuck with the Patriots even as the last few years saw so much of the champagne and parades lifestyle New England had grown used to evaporated into thin air and retirements, the wins got less frequent and the losses somehow got both more painful and more predictable, and he never complained. Never dished out blame or anger or excuses. Instead, his real leadership focused on believing in each other even after losing games getting punked in your home stadium, growing and learning and never giving up instead of focusing on the failures, and till the end, he never wavered, even a little bit.

You’ve probably seen more tributes and loving compliments to Matthew Slater today from the men who shared the field with him than you can even count, and almost to a man, they all have the same thing to say. Incredible football player, but a legitimately better human, leader, father, and friend. And according to most of the Patriots of the last decade, it’s not particularly close, in favor of the latter. It’s dangerous to idolize athletes, or anyone, really. But Matthew Slater, if every story out there about him is to be believed, never mind his proof-in-the-pudding charity work in schools and hospitals, he’s every bit as good a human as advertised, and maybe even better.

So congratulations on an outstanding, truly one-of-a-kind career that even a Hall of Fame dad can be proud of, Slater. If the Hall of Fame voters have been watching any football over the last 16 years, it’s only a matter of time before you join your dad in the gold jacket club, too.