When I got the chance to sit down with David Pollack to talk about his new book, Every Day Counts, I expected football stories. I expected ESPN stories. I expected some inspiration.
What I didn’t expect was how much of the conversation centered around loss, rebuilding, and faith discovered later in life.
The surprising thing about Every Day Counts is that while it absolutely delivers for football fans, especially anyone nostalgic for that era of SEC football, it’s also deeply personal. Pollack laughed while explaining that this wasn’t a vanity project celebrating his football career.
Watch the full interview below:
“This is not a book to celebrate my football career by any stretch,” he said. “But you are going to get a base of knowledge of how I fell in love with football.”
He walks readers through being a small, struggling high school player who suddenly hit a growth spurt between sophomore and junior year. “Football becomes a lot of fun, man, when you’re the hammer and you’re not the nail anymore,” he laughed.
But the deeper story is how faith entered his life unexpectedly.
Honestly, I admitted to Pollack that I always assumed he grew up deeply rooted in church culture because of how outspoken he’s been about Christianity throughout his career. That wasn’t the case at all.
“If you’d asked me my junior year of high school about Christianity, I’d have been like, ‘not real familiar,’” he told me.
Then came a church lock-in invitation from a neighbor. Pollack initially wanted no part of it until he heard the words every teenage boy wants to hear: stay up all night, eat food, and play games.
“That’s the first time I had ever heard the name of Jesus, ever that I could remember,” he said.
What followed was an unlikely mentorship with a teacher who patiently walked him through the Gospels and answered his questions without forcing anything on him. Pollack recalled asking how Christianity could possibly be true when so many people doubted it. His teacher answered simply: “This is the most scrutinized, studied, transcribed history book in the history of mankind.”
That conversation changed everything.
“The way I felt right afterwards and the way I started to live immediately became different,” Pollack said. “That’s why I knew there was a real God in heaven.”
The conversation eventually turned toward the hardest moments of his life: the neck injury that ended his NFL career, losing his role at ESPN, and the health struggles his wife has faced.
One thing Pollack said stayed with me long after the interview ended:
“It’s not God taking something from me. It’s God giving something to me.”
That perspective shapes the entire book. Every Day Counts isn’t about pretending life is easy. It’s about refusing to waste pain, success, setbacks, or even ordinary mornings.
“I think a lot of us prefer easy as we get older,” he told me near the end of our conversation. “Every Day Counts is about creating a scoreboard where you’re going to see everything matters. Today matters.”
And honestly, that’s why this book works. It doesn’t read like a celebrity memoir protecting an image. It reads like someone who’s been knocked down physically, spiritually, and emotionally, and kept getting back up with a clearer understanding of what actually matters most.
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