Running back Myles Gaskin announced his retirement from the NFL on Wednesday night, per Charean Williams of Pro Football Talk, closing a career that ran from a seventh-round selection in 2019 to a single appearance for the Seattle Seahawks in 2025. He is 29. The Myles Gaskin retirement post thanked the two organisations that bookended his career — Miami, where he spent four seasons, and Seattle, where he grew up.
"Football . . . there will never be enough words to explain how I feel about you, so I won't even try," Gaskin wrote. "What I will do is give all the game you gave me to the next generation of young players who dare to be great. Thank you. It's been real."
Three offensive snaps, and a last game at home
Gaskin's NFL career ended with three carries for six yards.
That was his 2025 season in full: one game for the Seahawks, three snaps on offence and five on special teams. For a player who once handled 173 carries in a season, the sample is almost a rounding error — but the location mattered more than the volume.
Gaskin was born in Lynnwood, Washington, played high school football at O'Dea in Seattle, and spent four years at the University of Washington. Finishing in a Seahawks uniform closed the loop.
"To the Miami Dolphins, boy, was that fun," he wrote. "To the Seattle Seahawks, thank you for letting me play my last snaps back at the crib."
Between those two stops came the parts of the résumé that rarely make highlight packages: two games with the Minnesota Vikings and one with the Los Angeles Rams in 2023, then five more Vikings appearances in 2024 that produced three carries for minus-one yard, one catch for 11 yards and three kick returns.
The 2020–21 window that held 88% of his rushing yards
Gaskin's production has an unusually sharp shape. Strip the career down to seasons and the concentration is obvious.
| Season | Team | G | Att | Rush yds | Rec | Rec yds | TD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Miami | 7 | 36 | 133 | 7 | 51 | 1 |
| 2020 | Miami | 10 | 142 | 584 | 41 | 388 | 5 |
| 2021 | Miami | 17 | 173 | 612 | 49 | 234 | 7 |
| 2022 | Miami | 4 | 10 | 26 | 4 | 28 | 0 |
| 2023 | LA Rams / Minnesota | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | Minnesota | 5 | 3 | −1 | 1 | 11 | 0 |
| 2025 | Seattle | 1 | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Career | 47 | 367 | 1,360 | 102 | 712 | 13 |
Season totals per NFL.com career stats; the three 2023 appearances were split between the Los Angeles Rams (one) and the Minnesota Vikings (two).
The two-year block in the middle carried the career:
- 1,196 of 1,360 rushing yards — 88% — came in 2020 and 2021.
- 622 of 712 receiving yards came in the same window.
- 12 of his 13 career touchdowns were scored across those two seasons.
- After the end of the 2021 campaign, he recorded 16 carries and five receptions in total.
That drop is the whole story of what happened next. Volume without efficiency is a fragile position for a back on a rookie contract, and Miami reshaped its backfield around new arrivals the following year. Gaskin appeared in four games in 2022 and never again reached double-digit carries in a season.
He finished at 3.7 yards per carry across 367 attempts, with four fumbles, three of them lost.
5,323 yards at Washington, then the seventh round
The pre-NFL version of the résumé reads very differently.
At Washington, Gaskin became the first player in Pac-12 history to rush for 1,000 yards in four consecutive seasons. He left with 5,323 career rushing yards, third in conference history, and 57 rushing touchdowns, and was a First Team All-Pac-12 selection in 2016.
None of it moved him up draft boards. Miami took him in the seventh round in 2019, and he responded with 36 carries as a rookie before taking over the backfield a year later — the rare late-round back who outperformed his slot immediately rather than eventually.
The gap between a decorated four-year college workload and a seventh-round grade is not unusual at the position, and neither is what followed. Gaskin played seven NFL seasons, which is roughly double the league-average career length at running back, and he did it while starting only 17 games. Most of the tail end was spent on practice squads.
He also leaves without a publicly known career-ending injury, which is not a small line item for a player who absorbed 367 carries and 102 receptions.
Faith, Family, Football: the Myles Gaskin retirement note
The farewell post was long, specific and short on grievance — no complaints about touches, no shots at any of the four organisations that employed him.
"Thank you, God; you have allowed me to live my childhood's greatest dream, which was to play the game I loved at the highest level," Gaskin wrote.
He thanked fans for the eight-month calendar they keep — "every Friday, Saturday, Sunday… Monday, Thursday" — and then the staff, teammates and coaches "at every level," adding that "every snap helped me grow into the man always wanted to become."
The thank-you list named trainer Tracy Ford, former Washington teammate Salvon Ahmed, his brother Ivan Gaskin as the first person who believed in him, and his parents, Scott and Robbie Gaskin. He signed off with a three-word personal motto: Faith, Family, Football.
The forward-looking line is the one worth flagging. Gaskin explicitly framed retirement as a handover rather than an exit — giving "all the game you gave me to the next generation of young players who dare to be great." He did not say whether that means high school, college or a professional staff, and no role has been announced.
What the note does confirm is the shape of the decision. A player with three carries across his last three seasons chose the timing himself, at 29, in his home city, rather than waiting for a phone that had already stopped ringing as often. That is a cleaner ending than the position usually offers.
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