Michael Vick expresses one important regret in new interview

Michael Vick’s professional journey is well-documented. He came out of college as the most electric college football player maybe in the history of the sport. While he wasn’t dominant at the NFL level, he did develop into the franchise QB for the Atlanta Falcons as the most unique quarterback talent in the entire league. However, just as he was entering his prime years at age 27, Vick was caught as part of a dogfighting operation and suspended for two whole years.

He wound up re-finding his NFL career with the Philadelphia Eagles, where he sat the bench for the year before getting the promotion to starter in 2010 at age 30 and wound up putting together his two best passing seasons with more than 3,000 yards in ’10 and ’11. All in all, it was a successful football career for Vick, but it could’ve been something much more if he hadn’t made such mistakes in his 20s.

In reflection, Vick recently shared that he knows he needed a role model back then, or at least someone who could have guided him away from such poor decisions.

“I wish I had a father figure or somebody in my life — and I did, too, for the most part — but not to the point where somebody was like, ‘Yo, man, you can really screw all this up,’” Vick said on a podcast with current Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill. “Ain’t nobody came and said, ‘Bro, you can screw all this up.’ One person [did], I won’t say his name.”

Vick went on to share the reparations of his actions. He expected that as soon as he came back from his suspension, Atlanta would hand him the starting QB job back and things would go back to exactly how they were. Alas, this was not the case.

“The whole time like I was gone I thought they was gonna wait on me, but that was wishful thinking,” Vick added. “Like, I really thought like they was gonna wait for me to get back and all this would be over and then I step back in, be the starter, and we just move on like nothing ever happened. But that’s not reality. And I was hoping for something that just couldn’t happen.”

Instead, Vick had to find a new home and even had to spend a year as a backup in order to finally get another shot at a starting job three years later.