Matthew L. Chatham (born June 28, 1977) is a former

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

linebacker Linebacker (LB) is a playing position in gridiron football. Linebackers are members of the defensive team, and line up three to five yards behind the line of scrimmage and the defensive linemen. They are the "middle ground" of defenders, p ...

. He played college football at

South Dakota South Dakota (; Sioux language, Sioux: , ) is a U.S. state in the West North Central states, North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Lakota people, Lakota and Dakota peo ...

. He played for the

New England Patriots The New England Patriots are a professional American football team based in the Greater Boston area. They compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's American Football Conference (AFC) AFC East, East divisio ...

and

New York Jets The New York Jets are a professional American football team based in the New York metropolitan area. The Jets compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's American Football Conference (AFC) East division. The J ...

High school years

Chatham attended

Sioux City North High School North High School (commonly North, North High, or NHS) is a public high school located in Sioux City, Iowa with an enrollment of approximately 1,500 students. The school is a part of the Sioux City School District and is one of three public high ...

Sioux City, Iowa Sioux City () is a city in Woodbury and Plymouth counties in the northwestern part of the U.S. state of Iowa. The population was 85,797 in the 2020 census, making it the fourth-largest city in Iowa. The bulk of the city is in Woodbury County, ...

, and won All-State honors in football and baseball.

College career

Chatham attended the University of South Dakota. As a junior, he made 95 tackles and six interceptions. In his senior year he made 74 tackles and one interception. He was a double major in English and Criminal Justice at South Dakota. Chatham received a Masters in Business Administration from

Babson College Babson College is a private business school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Established in 1919, its central focus is on entrepreneurship education. It was founded by Roger W. Babson as an all-male business institute, but became coeducational i ...

in 2011.

NFL career

Chatham was signed by the

St. Louis Rams The St. Louis Rams were a professional American football team of the National Football League (NFL). They played in St. Louis from 1995 to the 2015 season, before moving back to Los Angeles, where the team had played from 1946 to 1994. The arri ...

as a rookie free agent but was released before the start of the regular season. He spent the first six seasons of his career in New England, including contributing to three of the Patriots'

Super Bowl The Super Bowl is the annual final playoff game of the National Football League (NFL) to determine the league champion. It has served as the final game of every NFL season since 1966, replacing the NFL Championship Game. Since 2022, the game ...

victories (

XXXVI 36 (thirty-six) is the natural number following 35 and preceding 37. In mathematics 36 is both the square of six and a triangular number, making it a square triangular number. It is the smallest square triangular number other than one, and it ...

XXXVIII 38 (thirty-eight) is the natural number following 37 (number), 37 and preceding 39 (number), 39. In mathematics *38! − 1 yields which is the 16th factorial prime. *There is no answer to the equation Euler's totient function, φ(''x'') = 38, ma ...

, XXXIX). He was known as one of the leaders of the Patriots' stout special teams. During the 2003 season, he recorded his first and only NFL touchdown when he recovered a

Tiki Barber Atiim Kiambu "Tiki" Barber (; born April 7, 1975) is an American former football running back who played for the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL) for ten seasons. He played college football for the University of Virginia. B ...

fumble in a game against the

New York Giants The New York Giants are a professional American football team based in the New York metropolitan area. The Giants compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) East division. ...

and returned it for a 38-yard touchdown. XXXVIII, he tackled streaker Mark Roberts, who had come onto the field just before the second-half kickoff.

NFL career statistics

Regular season

Retirement career

Chatham now runs an NFL informational column in the Boston Herald called "The Chatham Report" and appears every Sunday morning on WEEI with Kevin Faulk, Dale Arnold and Christopher Price. He can be found on Twitter under @chatham58. He is a regular columnist on the Football By Football website. Chatham is also an in-studio football analyst with

NESN New England Sports Network, popularly known as NESN , is an American regional sports network, regional sports cable television, cable and satellite television, satellite television network owned by a joint venture of Fenway Sports Group (which ow ...

. He has also received his MBA from

and has started a creperie restaurant franchise called Skycrepers.

References

External links

NFL.com BioESPN's Greatest Super Bowl moments
1977 births Living people American football linebackers Babson College alumni South Dakota Coyotes football players New England Patriots players New York Jets players People from Newton, Iowa Players of American football from Iowa Sportspeople from Sioux City, Iowa North High School (Sioux City, Iowa) alumni {{linebacker-1970s-stub