After comeback season, Jordy Nelson contemplates retirement … sort of

GREEN BAY, Wis. — Jordy Nelson is here to tell you there’s a reason NFL players need a mental break as much as a physical one after a grueling season.

For as impressive as the Green Bay Packers veteran wide receiver’s comeback season was in 2016 — he caught 97 passes for 1,257 yards and an NFL-best 14 touchdowns after missing all of 2015 with a torn right ACL — there were times during the year when Nelson was ready to call it quits altogether.

“If you ask my wife [Emily], I’ve told her five different things this past year,” Nelson said Tuesday morning during an appearance on ESPN Wisconsin’s Wilde & Tausch. “From, ‘Don’t ever let me play again this year,’ to ‘Don’t ever let me play after this year,’ to ‘OK, I can play another five years.’

“I fully understand why people tell you after the season to take some time off and think about it and let the body heal, because in the middle of it all, you have all sorts of things going through your head.”

Now, don’t turn this into the annual Brett Favre will-he-or-won’t-he retirement melodrama. Nelson, who turns 32 in May and was named the AP NFL Comeback Player of the Year at the NFL Honors event on Feb. 4, enjoyed his comeback way too much to hang ’em up now. He played through painful broken ribs in the team’s season-ending NFC Championship Game loss to Atlanta and said the team’s eight-game winning streak late in the year allowed him to get “to the point where I was really able to enjoy football again.”

But Nelson does recognize he’s closer to the end of his career than he is to the beginning, and he contemplates his football mortality more now than he did when he entered the league as a second-round draft pick out of Kansas State in 2008.

Nelson, who is one of only eight players who remain with the Packers from the Super Bowl XLV-winning team of 2010, said he, his wife and the couple’s two sons are also very happy living in Green Bay year-round.

“I have two years left on my deal,” Nelson said of the four-year, $39.05 million extension he signed before the 2014 season, which included an $11.5 million signing bonus. “It’d be great to finish that out and then see where the body is at, to be honest with you.

“I’m going to take it year-by-year, because it’s 100 percent on how the body feels. We love it up here, my son loves his school, everything’s been perfect. As long as the body can handle it and [the Packers] want me, I’ll play. But as soon as one or the other gives in, then I’ll be more than willing to walk away and move back on the farm and kind of disappear from earth.”

Editor’s note: Jason Wilde covers the Green Bay Packers for ESPN Wisconsin.