Dungeons & Dragons-playing athletes take aim at nerd-jock divide

“Nerd” and “jock” are no longer mutually exclusive titles. Just ask former NFL fullback Johnny Stanton, who joined several other athletes last month for a Dungeons & Dragons livestream to raise money for charity.

Stanton was defined as a football player for years, but that has changed. Since his playing career ended in 2022, he has worn many hats, including those of performer and game designer. For a few hours last month, he was “Mirror,” a spell-casting warlock who reeks of the old parchments and dusty tomes that lead him toward adventure.

Stanton, as Mirror, played in the “Oops, All Athletes!” show, which raised more than $1,000 for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Beyond the charitable impact, the event further muddled the line between athletes and geeks.

Joining Stanton were professional wrestler Brandon Cutler, former collegiate rugby player Jes Wade, fitness coach Jay Foster, MMA fighter turned fitness influencer Tank Tolman and actor Alicia Marie.

“Everybody has a million different passions, these hobbies and facets that people have,” said Stanton, who started planning the event after a convention panel last summer. “Getting to know somebody more fully as a person, as opposed to just a performer on your screen or a number in a jersey on your TV, is always a good thing. It builds up the empathy and humanity in people.”

Participants have incorporated their love for tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons into their athletic careers.

Stanton said he embraced the media attention after running a campaign for his Browns teammates. Cutler wore a “dragon persona,” complete with face paint, armor and a 20-sided die during his work in the ring. Tolman provides uplifting fitness-oriented social media content set in “a Norse-inspired fantasy realm.”

Geeks and nerds once felt the need to relegate their dice-rolling habits to basements, but the culture is changing. “Dungeons & Dragons,” like previous comic books and video games, is infiltrating the mainstream.

Even sports, a bastion of traditional masculinity and a definer of “cool,” aren’t safe. Stanton is trying to narrow the divide.

“Whether it’s from the tropes of ’80s movies or it’s through their own experience as a high schooler, there is this idea that there is a binary of jocks versus nerds,” Stanton said. “And I think nowadays, all you have to do is watch [Arizona Cardinals quarterback] Kyler Murray play ‘Call of Duty’ on Twitch just to see how that’s changed.”

While Stanton focused on the broader invasion of games, Wade highlighted Dungeons & Dragons and credited Netflix’s “Stranger Things” with introducing the game to a broader audience.

“It’s such a popular show, that one; people started playing more Dungeons & Dragons because of it. But two, they saw their favorite actors being able to openly say, ‘Yes, I play Dungeons & Dragons, too,’” Wade said. “It’s not just a game for people in basements eating Doritos, whatever. So, it’s very interesting how the coin is flipping over time.”

Outside the fictional representation, “actual play” shows and podcasts, or recordings and livestreams of people playing tabletop games, have introduced a new generation to the hobby.

Yes, millions of people tune in to watch (or listen to, in the case of podcasts such as “The Adventure Zone”) other people play Dungeons & Dragons.

“Dimension 20” has 996,000 subscribers on YouTube and more than 7 million views on some episodes. Critical Role, a trailblazer in the community for producing videos of its games, has more than 2 million subscribers.

Cutler and Stanton said these shows acted as a gateway into their hobby.

“Everyone’s heard of D&D, but I would always say, ‘I’m a nerd, but I’m not that much of a nerd,’” Cutler said. “But then as I watched [actual-play shows], I was like, ‘Oh. I’m going to be big into D&D.’”

Stanton and Wade found gaming at low points. Looking back, they said the connection between team sports and tabletop games is simpler than most people think.

Stanton endured an underwhelming start to his college career that led him to bounce from Nebraska to junior college to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. During his first season in Las Vegas, he suffered a knee injury that forced him to take time away from the gridiron.

That was where Dungeons & Dragons came in.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t exactly the college football career I thought I was going to have. Let me try to have some escapism here,’” he said. “That’s how I got into it.”

Now, tabletop role-playing games are his career. The former fullback hosts the “Athletics Check” podcast, where he chats with games-focused guests about sports. He is also designing a tabletop game, “Kids in Cleats.”

Wade found the tabletop community after a knee injury kept him away from sports.

It was less than a year before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Wade and the rest of the country were even more isolated from their usual social groups.

“So many people were able to come together and find community through D&D, whether it was watching ‘Critical Role’ or ‘Dimension 20’ or finding other people to play with online,” Wade said. “It was a really good time through a bad time.”

Even these self-described nerds didn’t know the size of the market for their unique blend of content. When Stanton was fighting for a roster spot in the NFL — his fullback position is widely considered a dying art — being open about his off-field interests seemed wise.

Stanton developed a reputation after reporters learned about his D&D game with teammates Myles Garrett and Wyatt Teller.

“After putting in the work in the league to build up that brand as the athlete-nerd, it felt silly not to capitalize on that,” he said.

Stanton’s post-NFL life is unique.

“I could have tried the real estate route or the traditional business route. Maybe that would have been the smart move,” Stanton said. “But the thing where I could make the biggest difference is bringing together those two roles and breaking up that divide, that false binary of jock and nerd.”

The same could be said for Cutler, who made Dungeons & Dragons part of his athletic career in All Elite Wrestling. The wrestling world is full of gimmicks, so why not one inspired by fantasy? It started slowly, with a polyhedral-dice pattern on his tights as a nerdy wink to the audience.

He didn’t think people would embrace it as much as they did. He just enjoyed the concepts: Slamming an opponent onto a bed of sharp dice was always front of mind.

“Then we took it further and further,” he said.

The mask, face paint and dragon scale coat came next, courtesy of the wrestler’s artistically inclined wife.

“We had the idea of, what if I made my in-ring character like somebody who just stepped out of a D&D world?” Cutler said. The fans loved it. “It was a good reaction that showed there is a connection between people that are into D&D and overall tabletop and people in wrestling.”

As the overlap between sports and tabletop games grows, Stanton and company hope to be at the forefront. Those hobbies and interests that once made countless teens the subjects of teasing are now in vogue.

Cutler said he hopes to return the “dragon persona” to the ring this year as he goes all-in on the tabletop-wrestling overlap.

“I want to push to make my wrestling presence more about the tabletop stuff,” Cutler said. “Then I also want to do streams, panels at conventions, guest on people’s shows. Things that help bring awareness to both sides of it. If you like sports, you might like tabletop and vice versa.”