Patriots receiver Julian Edelman announces retirement

For more than a decade Julian Edelman lived the ultimate NFL underdog story, going from undersized college quarterback to a favorite option of Tom Brady on three Patriots' Super Bowl-winning teams.

He says he'll leave the league after giving everything he had to the sport.

Citing a knee injury that cut his 2020 season short after just six games, Edelman announced Monday that he is retiring from the NFL after 11 seasons.

FILE — In this Sunday, Dec. 30, 2018 file photo New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman (11) stretches but cannot catch a pass in front of New York Jets safety Jamal Adams, rear, during the second half of an NFL football game, in Foxborough, Mass. The Patriots terminated Edelman's contract with a failed physical designation Monday, April 12, 2021, according to the NFL's transaction wire. The 34-year-old battled a chronic knee injury for the past two seasons and was limited to six games in 2020. (AP PhotoSteven Senne, File)

“Nothing in my career has ever come easy. And no surprise, this isn’t going to come easy either,” Edelman said fighting back tears in a video posted to Twitter. “I’ve always said I’m going to go until the wheels come off. And they finally have fallen off."

Earlier in the day, the Patriots terminated the contract of the Super Bowl 53 MVP after the receiver failed a physical.

It brings an abrupt end to the 11-year New England tenure of the 34-year-old, whose fingertip catch helped complete the Patriots’ historic Super Bowl 51 comeback win over the Atlanta Falcons.

FILE - In this July 31, 2016, file photo, New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman greets fans as he steps on the field before an NFL football training camp practice in Foxborough, Mass. Citing a knee injury that cut his 2020 season short after just six games, Edelman announced Monday, April 12, 2021, that he is retiring from the NFL after 11 seasons. (AP PhotoSteven Senne, File)

“By any measure of what constitutes an elite NFL career — wins, championships, production — Julian has it all,” Patriots coach Bill Belichick said in a statement. “Few players can match Julian’s achievements, period, but considering his professional trajectory and longevity, the group is even more select. It is historic. This is a tribute to his legendary competitiveness, mental and physical toughness and will to excel."

Team owner Robert Kraft called Edelman "one of the great success stories in our franchise’s history."

He appeared in just six games last season before going on injured reserve following a surgical procedure on his knee. He also missed the entire 2017 season after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.

FILE - In this Sept. 10, 2015, file photo, New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman (11) cannot catch a pass in the end zone as Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Cortez Allen (28) defends in the second half of an NFL football game in Foxborough, Mass. Citing a knee injury that cut his 2020 season short after just six games, Edelman announced Monday, April 12, 2021, that he is retiring from the NFL after 11 seasons. (AP PhotoCharles Krupa, File)

Edelman was entering the final season of a two-year, $15.5 million contract. He was facing an uphill climb to make the roster in 2021 following the Patriots’ efforts to remake the receiving group after their struggles last season. This offseason the Patriots have already added receivers Kendrick Bourne and Nelson Agholor in free agency.

A seventh-round pick in the 2009 draft out of Kent State, Edelman retires ranked second in team history with 620 receptions, fourth in receiving yards 6,822 and ninth with 36 receiving touchdowns.

He also had 58 rushing attempts for 413 yards, the most rushing attempts and rushing yards by a wide receiver in Patriots history. His 9,869 all-purpose yards are fourth in team history.

FILE - In this Nov. 16, 2016, file photo, New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman speaks with reporters in the team's locker room before an NFL football team practice in Foxborough, Mass. Citing a knee injury that cut his 2020 season short after just six games, Edelman announced Monday, April 12, 2021, that he is retiring from the NFL after 11 seasons. (AP PhotoSteven Senne, File)

Edelman will be most remembered for what he did during the postseason, though, amassing 118 catches for 1,422 yards and seven touchdowns.

He reached his pinnacle in Super Bowl 53 when he hauled in 10 receptions for 141 yards in helping lift the Patriots to a 13-3 victory over the Los Angeles Rams.

That postseason Edelman also tied Dallas’ Michael Irvin for the second-most 100-yard receiving games in the postseason with six, just two behind Jerry Rice’s NFL record.

“Day in and day out, Julian was always the same: all out,” Belichick said. “Then, in the biggest games and moments, with championships at stake, he reached even greater heights and delivered some of his best, most thrilling performances.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)