One player from each team is connected to farming
Football’s biggest game happens this Sunday as the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks go to battle in Super Bowl LX (60).
As it turns out, one player from each team got his start in farm fields before making it big on the football field.
Representing ag from the Seattle Seahawks is Grey Zabel, an offensive lineman.
The 1st round pick of the 2025 NFL draft grew up on his family’s cash crop operation in Pierre, S.D. One year earlier, he rented 250 acres to start his own cash crop farm, Northland Farms.
Working on a farm and playing football have commonalities, Zabel said.
"Growing up, working at the farm, and kind of understanding that farming and football have a lot in common," Zabel said in April 2025. "You plant seed in the dirt in the spring and tend to it and try to get it as much as you can to grow a great crop in the fall, and football is the same exact way. You work all offseason to get your body strong, healthy, and then you go reap the benefits in the fall.”
And while playing football at North Dakota State University, Zabel earned a major in agriculture with minors in economics and precision agriculture.
His education included an internship with Nutrien at its Mapleton, N.D. location.
In the second year of his internship, Zabel was involved in an agronomy project.
“Grey took on more agronomy-related responsibilities and was tasked with compiling a project about soil and plant nutrition in the North Dakota Division. As part of the project, he took all the information from trials in the division and evaluated the results to give recommendations on how to best communicate the benefits of soil tests to growers in their area,” Nutrien said in May 2025.
Also bringing an ag background with him into Super Bowl Sunday is Will Campbell, an offensive lineman for the New England Patriots from Monroe, La.
The fourth overall pick of the 2025 NFL draft spent his youth on his family’s farm with his father, Brian, a corn, soybean and cotton farmer. Brian is also a seed salesman, and a former collegiate offensive lineman.
As a kid Campbell would help his dad install irrigation pipes or trim weeds around the farm.
And his LinkedIn profile says he’s in his 10th year as a farmer at Rolling Ridge Farm in Tallulah, La.
People who’ve seen Campbell’s work ethic attribute that to farm life.
“Where you’ve got to do manual labor, it gives you a different type of grit,” Roddrell Stewart, Campbell’s personal trainer, told the Boston Herald in May 2025 about his client’s effort in the hot summer of 2020. “Man, he didn’t cower. No matter how difficult it was, no matter how hot it was, no matter what it was, he was always willing to work.”
In 2025, Campbell participated in interviews as part of his NIL partnership with Sunshine Quality Solutions, a John Deere dealer in southern Louisiana.
He spoke of how growing up on a farm helped shape him as a young man.
“At a farm you’re trusted at a young age with lots of expensive equipment or whatever that might be,” he said. “Learning hard work and labor and what all goes into it.”
In another interview, Campbell identified John Deere’s 8 Series as his favorite tractors.
Zabel and Campbell aren’t the only connections agriculture has to the Super Bowl:
- Some of this year’s commercials highlight agriculture and farmers.
- About six cow hides are used to make game balls.
- Americans are projected to consume 1.48 billion chicken wings during the game, the National Chicken Council says
- About 325 million gallons of beer will be drunk on Super Bowl Sunday.
- And about 11.2 million pounds of potato chips are eaten during the game, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says.