Time To Rebuild

In Case Pro Sports Doesn’t Work Out—And Even If It Does—Players Are Redefining Their Careers With Various Side Gigs

- Jamie Lisanti

STANDING IN the middle of a gutted first floor, the smell of fresh paint seeping down from upstairs, the roar of a power sander a few feet away, Brandon Copeland flips open his laptop. “These are my plans for the kitchen,” says the 6' 3", 120-kg Jets outside linebacker. He taps on the screen to reveal a document with handwritten notes at the top: eagles offense. “Oops—that’s my playbook,” he says. “These are the plans.”

The next tab has precise diagrams of fixtures and cabinets that Copeland sketched while in the training room this summer at Florham Park, New Jersey.

It’s less than 12 hours after the Jets’ 10–9 loss to the Eagles in an August preseason game and Copeland is inspecting tile work in the bathroom and mapping out electrical wiring in the basement of a renovation project in Ellicott City, Maryland. The 27-year-old had bought the house for $384,000 in June 2017, about a year after he purchased his first investment property, in Detroit, at a time when his NFL future was in doubt.