For NFL players, retirement provides a whole host of options.
Some decide to take their talents to the broadcasting world and become high-profile announcers and analysts, while many return to the sideline to take on coaching roles.
Others, though, decide to do something completely different with their lives after football.
Just look at former Tennessee Titans teammates Brian Orakpo and Michael Griffin, who swapped their cleats for sweets.
After their decade-long NFL careers, the pair launched a successful cupcake business.
Orakpo and Griffin, two former first round draft picks who made a combined $103million in the NFL, opened a franchise of Gigi’s Cupcakes in Austin, Texas, back in 2018.
The pair have gone from playing with the likes of Derrick Henry, Cam Newton and Greg Olsen, to running their new business alongside longtime friend Bryan Hynson.
A cupcake venture may seem odd for a 200-pound safety and a 257-pound linebacker, but both had a sweet tooth and thought taking on a franchise could be the best way to learn about business post-NFL.
As their 10-year careers were coming to an end, Orakpo and Griffin made an offseason pact to embark on a sweet journey after hanging up their cleats.
“We always wanted to be entrepreneurs, we all love sweets,” Orakpo said in 2023, describing their journey from football to frosting.
“Every time in the offseason we got together, we had sweets at the end of night. The thing that came to me was, ‘Hey fellas, let’s open up a cupcake shop’.
“They thought it was the stupidest thing ever, but we wanted to get a jump-start with the help of our boy (Hynson) who has already been in the real word.”
Hynson, already a small business owner who also worked in banking, leveraged his experience to help the trio become franchisees in 2017.
He described Orakpo and Griffin as ‘grinding every day’ to make their cupcake dream a success.
“The only people that really have your best interests at heart is yourself,” Griffin said, speaking back in 2021.
“So we agreed to start this business, we all agreed that it wasn’t going to be any significant others, it wasn’t going to be family, it was going to have to be us three that run and operate our store.”
Having been in the NFL for 10 years, the two stars saw a lot of former players struggle to transition out of the league, and were determined to be different.
Orakpo said: “You’d see so many times while we played, a lot of footballers or athletes in general have a hard time making that transition out of the game.
“It just worked out perfect. We reached out to Gigi’s Cupcakes out of Nashville, and they were huge Tennessee Titans fans.
“That’s all she wrote, it literally took off from there.
“They helped us do the process, we opened one out here in Austin since they had no locations, and here we are today, alive and well.”
In more recent years, Orakpo, Griffin, and Hynson have taken their story to television, with a six-episode series titled ‘Cupcake Guys’ that documents their venture.
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