While watching last week’s Packers-Jets game, I was curious whether former Blue Duke and ex-Jet Nick Bellore was still in the NFL. He’s been in the league so long that he’d become a kind of background fixture. Just a Whitefish Bay kid you’d spot on kick coverage in a Jets, 49ers, Lions, Seahawks and, finally, Commanders jersey. Surely, I thought, he’s still out there somewhere.
Turns out, for the first time in 15 years, he isn’t. Not on the football field, at least, as he stepped back in July of this year.
The Washington Commanders placed Bellore on the reserve/retired list in July, two days before the team’s first training camp practice (they signed former Packer Rasul Douglas to take his roster spot the same day). He had a year left on the two-year deal he signed with Washington in March 2025.
A resume nobody predicted
From his Pro Football Reference page, here are the numbers: 232 games, 17 starts at linebacker and fullback, 280 tackles, five tackles for loss, a sack, three forced fumbles, and six fumble recoveries. Two Pro Bowls, in 2020 and 2023, both earned on special teams. He logged 4,387 special teams snaps across his career, against 857 on defense and 235 on offense. Spotrac puts his career earnings a little north of $20 million. He never played fewer than 13 games in a season.
Bellore holds the record for most NFL seasons played by any Central Michigan Chippewa.
Now a quick rewind to April 2011.
“They don’t always get found”
Two weeks before that year’s draft, Journal Sentinel NFL writer Bob McGinn wrote a piece on Bellore under the headline “Whitefish Bay’s Bellore awaits the draft.” McGinn had polled eight NFL scouts on where the Central Michigan middle linebacker would go. Their guesses ranged from the third round to “seventh or free agent.” One AFC scouting director praised his production and toughness in the same breath as he flagged the problem: a 4.8-second forty. Smart, tough, always around the ball — but undrafted, when the weekend finally came.
Bellore told McGinn he’d be fine either way, and closed the interview with a line that reads differently now than it did then. He said there were plenty of good players in Wisconsin, but “they don’t always get found.”
It’s safe to say he went out there and made sure someone would find him. He signed with the Jets on July 26, 2011, and made the opening roster. He played in every game as a rookie and led the team with 31 special teams tackles. In 2012 he caught a pass off a Tim Tebow fake punt and gained 23 yards on it. By 2014, Pro Football Focus had named him an All-Pro special teamer.
Then he just kept going. Four years with the Jets, two with San Francisco, two in Detroit, five in Seattle, two in Washington — most of it on one-and-two-year deals, every one of which he had to earn again the following August. Fifteen years of being the guy the roster cuts were supposed to reach and never did.
Before all that: seven varsity letters and a Duke Pride Award
Whitefish Bay has sent a handful of athletes to the professional ranks. It has not sent many like Bellore, and the school’s hall of fame bio makes the case plainly: one of the most decorated players in Blue Dukes history.
He was a three-sport athlete — football, track and hockey — and collected seven varsity letters across the three. He started three years on the football team and captained it as both a junior and a senior. He won the Duke Pride Award in 2005 and again in 2006. He took first team All-Conference honors both of those seasons, and was named North Shore Conference Defensive Player of the Year as a senior in 2006, a year in which the Blue Dukes football program credits him with 148 tackles, 20 tackles for loss and six sacks.
The Wisconsin Football Coaches Association named him honorable mention All-State as a junior and first team All-State as a senior.
He also, as McGinn noted, played that senior season hurt — he tore ligaments in his hand in the first game after committing to Central Michigan the previous July, and played through it. He graduated a semester early, enrolled at Central Michigan in January 2007 with a 15-credit load, and was starting at middle linebacker almost immediately.
The college career followed the same script. He started 51 of 52 games. He set the CMU freshman record for tackles with 102 and ranks among the top three tacklers in CMU history. He was the Chippewas’ Defensive Player of the Year in 2008 and 2009 and earned All-Conference honors from 2008 through 2010.
So: a Whitefish Bay kid who went undrafted, ended up playing 15 years in the NFL, and made two Pro Bowls.
Way to represent Whitefish Bay, Nick. Enjoy whatever adventures retirement has in store!
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