Cassius Marsh is helping advance the commonly held belief that playing for the New England Patriots isn’t much fun.
The fifth-year defensive end, who was signed by the San Francisco 49ers in November after a nine-game stint in New England, said his time with the Pats made him question whether he wanted to continue playing.
“They don’t have fun there. There’s nothing fun about it. There’s nothing happy about it. I didn’t enjoy any of my time there,” Marsh told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It made me for the first time in my life think about not playing football because I hated it that much.”
Playing for Bill Belichick, Marsh said, meant filling roles that went away from his strengths. Rather than bolster the pass rush, Marsh’s forte and the reason he thought he was brought to New England, he was dropping back in pass coverage and doing things on defense that he’d never done before.
“They asked me to do a bunch of stuff that I had never done: covering running backs and receivers and basically almost never rushing the passer, which is what I did in playing defensive line,” Marsh continued, adding that he grew so frustrated that he asked to be traded. “I confronted [Belichick] about all the things that were going on. I won’t get into detail, but it was B.S. things they were doing. I just wasn’t a fan. And so I, basically, without asking to get cut, I kind of asked to get cut.”
Thus far, things have all worked out for the better. The 49ers signed Marsh to a two-year, $7.7 million contract extension in February.