Before he was screaming about milk being a “bad choice” in Anchorman or sprinting through Manhattan in bright yellow tights, Will Ferrell was nowhere near the NFL radar. He wasn’t the star high school athlete made for the draft, though if you looked closely, you’d find a kid splitting high school uprights on Friday nights and later earning a college degree analyzing the sports industry from the sidelines. Still, his actual link to pro football came in the most absurd way possible. A 22-year-old Ferrell was just a USC kid taking on “fun, dumb jobs” to get by, including a single shift at Disneyland that ended with the Dallas Cowboys in his HR file.

On Good Hang with Amy Poehler, he revealed the day he learned he won’t get to work at the ride he wants, and a job on the beach sounded better.

“I got a job, and you were paid for the orientation day to work at Disneyland,” Ferrell said amid laughs. “And I thought that I was going to be assigned to be one of the really fun jobs like the Jungle Cruise operator. And I find out, oh no, those guys work there for eight years before they get – so they assign me one of the front kiosks for selling tickets. At the same time, I had a rival offer to work at a friend’s surf shop. A friend that was managing a surf shop right down at Newport Beach. Same pay, $5.50 an hour.

But I was too embarrassed to call up Disneyland. So my friend John called on my behalf, and said, ‘I will be quitting after one day.’ And they asked, ‘Okay, a reason for leaving?’ And he said, ‘I have a tryout with the Dallas Cowboys.’ And they went, ‘Thank you very much.’ So, somewhere, there’s a file at Disney corporate, it says, ‘Will Ferrell worked for one day. Reason for leaving: tryout with the Dallas Cowboys football team.’”

While the HR was busy filing away what they assumed was a legitimate NFL dream, the truth was far away from it. Ferrell was simply executing his very first high-stakes comedy bit. To be fair, his athletic resume wasn’t entirely built out of thin air. Back in high school, he had had some experience as a varsity kicker, scoring five out of seven field goals during his senior year; that stat line led him to have a brief tryout with the USC Trojans.

The Trojans let him kick exactly eight times before politely waving him off the field. Undeterred by his short-lived gridiron career, Ferrell leaned into the operational side of athletics, graduating from USC with a degree in sports information in 1990. He even landed an internship in the sports department of a local TV station, though the experience quickly taught him that broadcasting wasn’t quite his calling. 

Instead, his true football destiny turned out to be a mix of lifelong fandom and high-level mischief. He remained a staple at USC prep rallies and games, eventually earning a legendary invite from then-head coach Pete Carroll as a surprise tryout player before the Trojans’ 2004 Rose Bowl showdown against Michigan. When Carroll packed his bags for the NFL in 2010 to lead the Seattle Seahawks, Ferrell’s loyalty followed his friend straight to the Pacific Northwest.

He embraced the franchise so completely that he once crashed a virtual Seahawks team meeting on a Zoom call, hilariously posing as newly signed tight end Greg Olsen to inspect the playbook and show off his “yoga body.” Clearly, that fateful Dallas Cowboys excuse to Disney wasn’t a missed career opportunity; it was just the very first preview of a comedian mastering the art of the straight-faced prank.

Dallas never got their kicker, but pop culture got Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby, and Jackie Moon, proving that skipping out on ticket sales was the best career move he ever made. Along the way, he’s also turned that one-day Disneyland gig into a resume topped with serious accolades. He earned the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2011, got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015, and has multiple Primetime Emmys for Succession, Drunk History, and other projects. Football has even brought him to Netflix’s The Roast of Tom Brady, where he got a standing ovation just for walking up to the podium.