His DC Defenders lost Saturday. He’ll be back in the office Monday.
Andre Mintze knew he shouldn’t be here.
Answering questions, dressed head-to-toe in a red uniform, minutes from taking the field — this isn’t a typical morning for him these days. That’s why the DC Defenders defensive lineman couldn’t help but glance at his Google Calendar while chatting.
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“I’d be leading a meeting right now,” he said through a smirk, the Ferris Bueller type that apparently also escapes when playing hooky from your job. “Didn’t tell my boss about this, so I need to keep an eye on what’s going on. I’ll be back in the office on Monday.”
The pass rusher doubles as the chief operating officer of a Baltimore health care company, Brighter Days Recovery Center. There, he’s burrowing into his dream career after majoring in medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt.
Here, though, he’s a football player. And not a bad one, having spent a couple of years on the NFL’s fringes, notching 5.5 sacks last season for the Defenders and coming back for their playoff run this season, which ended in a 27-20 loss to the Louisville Kings in the title game Saturday.
“He learned about it when he saw me on TV,” Mintze said of his boss. “We talked. He didn’t know much about the UFL, but he’s rooting for me. Just need to go back to work next week.”
Up in the stands, Walter Toller, a mental health nurse practitioner and the man who offered Mintze a job less than a year ago, had come around by the time — in the fittingly chaotic land of the UFL — the Defenders were lining up to practice field goals from beyond 60 yards, because those are worth four points around here.
“He just said he needed some time off, and I didn’t ask him,” Toller said. They missed him in the office, he continued, but this was a reasonable use of his vacation days. “I told him he’s got to get one sack. Then we’re good.”
Alas, Mintze finished without said sack and with just one tackle. And considering this is, as he noted in a LinkedIn post three hours before the game, the actual end of his professional football career, it was a bittersweet affair.
In his eyes, Mintze has squeezed everything he was destined to out of football, his first joy. He spent a year with the Denver Broncos in 2021 and was invited to Minnesota Vikings training camp in 2022, and after his NFL days were done, he transitioned to the UFL and finished third in the league in sacks in his third year. A ring was a nice way to wrap up — for the most part — this portion of his life last June and head into the next, which he had already defined well before any of this.
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He became fascinated with the medical field after tearing his ACL for the third time in college. The injury’s effect proved deeper than his year recovering, given he switched his major and etched a 10-year plan — maybe 20-year, if this whole football thing prolonged — to enter the medical field.
He meandered off the route, and in 2024, he started working as a car salesman to offset his UFL contract. One afternoon, a man was looking to purchase, and they spent hours together during the finalization process.
“I could see the drive, I could see the motivation, I could definitely see that charisma and intelligence,” Toller recalls, comparing those traits to the ones Mintze exercised in this decision. “He fit. I wanted him.”
Soon, the consistent training and long evenings at Audi Field evaporated, and Mintze set off into his new life, though weekend afternoons remained strictly reserved for watching his former team. The urge to play never dissipated; his teammates kept texting and calling and nudging him.
Then, before the playoffs began, Defenders Coach Shannon Harris sent him a picture of his nameplate with a question mark. After weeks of badgering, the answer was already simmering in Mintze’s heart.
“For him to come back out and take some PTO for two weeks, it’s great for him to do that,” Harris said. “Shows a lot about how much he cares about his teammates.”
Despite the result, he stood there on the field after the game taking everything in, Toller watching from a couple of rows up. They seemed to briefly pass a short smile at one another before Mintze lumbered away to the locker room.
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He has a meeting he should be at Monday morning.
