Eric Dungy, 33

One would have to guess that Eric Dungy is among an extreme minority of people who can say a job coaching in the National Football League was his backup plan.

But that’s exactly how Dungy looked at it.

Photo by Mark Wemple

Dungy had played college football as a wide receiver at the highest level, first at the University of Oregon and later, for a season, at the University of South Florida. But in 2015, with his collegiate career over for about a year, he was looking at his next chapter. 

At about that time, his former coach at Oregon, Chip Kelly, was head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. Kelly, Dungy says, offered him a coaching job, an entry level spot, on his staff that fall.

The offer was tempting, especially for someone who’d spent his life in the game and with his pedigree. (His father is Tony Dungy, the Hall of Fame former Tampa Bay Buccaneer head coach.)

But Dungy turned the job down. He was working toward a real estate license and wanted to focus on going into business for himself.

He got his license that October.

“For whatever reason, I just felt that I wanted to see it through,” he says of his thinking at the time. “And if it didn't work out, then maybe the next season, I'll look into coaching.”

“But it was just one of the things where I kind of had enough with football and I wanted to take a little bit of a break, and I started the classes.”

Does he regret the decision?

No, he says.

Dungy, now a real estate advisor with Compass Real Estate in Tampa, has carved out a niche for himself in the industry working with athletes and celebrities in the area, mainly football players and coaches and baseball players.

Guiding Dungy as he’s forged an entrepreneurial path is his mentor Armando Hernandez, a local businessman and one of his father’s closest friends.

Dungy says Hernandez was a mentor when he finished playing football and encouraged him to get his real estate license. He calls the man a “faith-based person, somebody whose ethics and morals I value and can appreciate.”

“He’s really taken a liking to me and showed me there was a way to do things outside of just being an athlete and about being a small business owner, which, you basically are as a Realtor.”