Johnathan Hankins spent over a decade being one of the most dependable interior run-stuffers in football, and now that career is officially over. The 34-year-old defensive tackle has decided to retire after 12 NFL seasons, closing out a run that started at Ohio State and carried him through five different franchises.

“Veteran DT Johnathan Hankins tells me he is retiring from the NFL after 12 seasons,” Jordan Schultz reported on X. “An outstanding career for the former 2nd-round pick out of Ohio State, who was drafted by the Giants and also played for the Colts, Raiders, Cowboys, and Seahawks. Hankins appeared in 169 career games and was among the league’s premier run-stuffing interior defensive linemen.” 

The numbers backs up Hankins’ reputation. Across 169 games and 142 starts, Hankins finished with 433 combined tackles, 44 tackles for loss, 18.5 sacks, 13 forced fumbles, three fumble recoveries, 13 pass breakups, one interception, and 52 quarterback hits, a career built on durability and consistency rather than highlight-reel numbers.

That durability traces back to Ohio State, where Hankins helped the Buckeyes go 27-8 over three seasons and earned All-Big Ten and Second Team All-American honors as a junior. The Giants took him in the second round, 49th overall, in the 2013 draft, and he broke out fast, starting all 16 games in his second season and posting a career-high seven sacks on his way to a Pro Football Focus All-Pro nod. A torn pectoral muscle limited him to just nine games in 2015, an early reminder that even his kind of durability had limits.

He signed a three-year, $27 million deal with the Colts after his rookie contract expired, only to be released before the final two years of guaranteed base salary kicked in. The Raiders picked him up in September 2018, eventually re-signing him to a two-year, $8.5 million deal, then to one-year contracts in each of the following two offseasons. Las Vegas traded him to Dallas in October 2022, and the Cowboys brought him back on another one-year deal in 2023, when he started all 14 of his appearances that season, giving their run defense exactly the physical anchor it needed at the time.

He signed with Seattle in March 2024 for what became the final season of his career on the field. The Seahawks re-signed him again in May 2025, and head coach Mike Macdonald made clear how much they valued him going into that deal.

“A heck of a player,” Macdonald said, calling Hankins someone who’d played “some pretty dang good football” the year before.

However, an injury bug bit Hankins hard, forcing him off the league. That’s the reason why in his 13th season, he never got off the ground.

The injury that likely forced the Cowboys starter out of the NFL

 Shortly after re-signing that May, Hankins suffered a severe back injury that wiped out his entire 2025 season, including training camp. Seattle placed him on the reserve/non-football injury list, and by December, the team waived him with a settlement, freeing him to test free agency roughly two months before the Seahawks went on to win the Super Bowl without him.

Eventually, Seattle released him from the reserve/NFI list with a non-injury settlement, allowing him to hit free agency. But rather than trying to force another comeback through grueling rehabilitation, Hankins chose to retire on his own terms. 

Hankins’ retirement lands right as the league moves on without him. Training camps are already underway across the NFL, with the 2026 season set to open in early September, the first year in over a decade that Hankins won’t be preparing to line up in a defensive front somewhere.