As Other Power Leagues Shy Away From PE, the Big Ten Continues Discussions
Weeks before his life changed, Connor McGovern sat at a dinner table at his family’s lake house near the South Dakota–Minnesota border. His family gathered around him, along with a college teammate, Clay Rhodes, who couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
The 2016 NFL draft was weeks away. McGovern, who was then a standout offensive lineman at Missouri, was expected to be taken in the later rounds.
“You realize that you’re walking away from more money [in] the family business in comparison to going to the NFL,” Rhodes recalled McGovern’s grandfather, Ron Offutt, saying.
Rhodes thought Offutt might have misunderstood his grandson’s draft projection. McGovern was in a position to earn millions of dollars over his first contract. But as the conversation continued, Rhodes realized Offutt’s appraisal was valid.
“My jaw kind of dropped,” Rhodes tells Front Office Sports. “I’m like, ‘This guy’s serious.’”
There are only so many family businesses lucrative enough to make an athlete consider passing on going pro. McGovern’s is one of them. Offutt, a fourth-generation farmer known as the “Sultan of Spuds,” has grown his company into the country’s largest commercial potato producer, and it’s the primary provider of the ones used in McDonald’s french fries. R.D. Offutt operates out of multiple states, and the family is the richest in North Dakota, worth more than $500 million. McGovern, meanwhile, is a New Orleans Saints center in his eighth season in the NFL and has sustained multiple injuries, playing in just 12 games over the past year and a half.
Often, teammates ask him the same question: “Why are you doing this?”
McGovern grew up in Fargo, N.D., and spent his childhood riding with his dad, Keith, in trucks during harvest season, learning how to pull potatoes out of the ground while picking up the intricacies of the family business. In the ’90s, when McGovern was a kid, McDonald’s was the company’s best-known customer. But it has since expanded to be the primary potato supplier for Wendy’s, Raising Cane’s, Frito-Lay chips, and Idahoan Instant Mashed Potatoes, in addition to growing beans and corn on more than 190,000 farmland acres. Keith McGovern is R.D. Offutt’s current president.
The growth in business has allowed McGovern to avoid playing favorites when it comes to the products his family helps produce. He’ll eat anywhere. “I don’t have a loyalty,” he tells FOS. “I’m just loyal to potatoes and french fries.”
At Missouri, McGovern mostly kept his family’s wealth to himself. “My parents did a really good job of making sure that I wasn’t enjoying that silver spoon I was born with and didn’t even let me know I had it,” McGovern says. Over time, teammates pieced together his situation. There was his tricked-out Ford Raptor truck, and at the grocery store, he’d point out various products his family helped produce.
“I don’t think he was hiding it from people,” Rhodes says. “I just don’t think he really cared about that aspect of his life and what others thought about it.”
So what did McGovern’s teammates think when they learned their friend was the heir to an empire built from potatoes? “I thought it was insane,” said Evan Boehm, McGovern’s close friend and fellow lineman at Mizzou. “I thought it was so cool. I really did.”
McGovern’s farming background became a source of both humor and fascination. Nobody tapped into it more than Boehm. “Coach, it’s O.K.,” Boehm would say whenever a coach was hard on McGovern. “He’s got potatoes.”
When Rhodes visited McGovern’s family in Fargo, he learned there was a certain way to eat at their dinner table. “If you’re around the McGoverns and there are potatoes being served at the table, the potatoes have to be eaten first, before anything,” Rhodes says. The rule counts for any form of potato—fries, mashed, in a salad or any other dish.
When McGovern started training for the draft, his agent, CAA’s Tom Condon, gave him an early scouting report.
“All the scouts are telling me the biggest knock is you came from money,” McGovern recalled Condon saying.
McGovern knew his wealth came with a stigma: Players who come from money aren’t as tough or hardworking. He understood the stereotype, even though he didn’t think it applied to him, which is why he went out of his way to point out to teams that getting rich off farming is unique.
“I always say I come from blue-collar farm money, and that’s a little different,” McGovern says. “We have good years and bad years. It takes a lot of work to pull money out of the ground and make it grow, and most of the stuff you deal with is out of your control, like weather and all that kind of stuff. So it’s a little different than having oil money that comes out of the ground. It’s not watching the stock market move up and down.
“Growing cash and having liquid gold are two very different things.”
The Denver Broncos selected McGovern in the fifth round of the 2016 draft. He established himself as a starter on their offensive line toward the end of his second season. In 2020, he signed a three-year contract with the New York Jets for $27 million and became their starting center. But two of his seasons ended in injury; he injured his right MCL in 2021 and dislocated his knee on the same leg in 2023.
In the NFL, McGovern was more open about his background than he had been in college.
“Some guys really respected it,” McGovern says. “Some were like, ‘Man, what are you doing? This game is so hard. Why are you here if you can be making good money just by going home and farming?’”
McGovern says he’s never shied away from the conversation because he’s proud of what his family has built. “I wanted to make a name for myself and show that my hard work earned myself something, and I wasn’t riding on the coattails of everybody,” he says.
This season has been the most precarious of McGovern’s career. The 31-year-old remained unsigned through the summer and spent time at home in Fargo, contemplating retirement and wondering whether it was the right time to enter the family business. His family had just built a home in the area, he had more than $33 million in career earnings, and he was ready to spend more time with his wife and two daughters. But in September, the Jets offered him a spot on their practice squad, and he decided he was willing to return; he thought they had unfinished business after losing Aaron Rodgers four plays into last season.
His stay with the Jets was short, though. The Saints signed him off the practice squad three weeks later and immediately inserted him into their rotation. Though there’s plenty of NFL season left, McGovern’s recent run of playing time could delay his entrance into the family business. Whenever he does switch careers, though, he’ll have to work his way to the top, just like his other relatives.
“There’s no nepotism in the family,” McGovern says. “I don’t get to just walk in and have a role. Just like you have to earn your spot in the NFL … everything has got to be earned.”
