New Orleans Breakers Flashback: Jeff Gaylord

The New Orleans Breakers were a United States Football League franchise that played in the Louisiana Superdome for one season, in 1984.

The Breakers began their USFL tenure in Boston, in 1983, but a stadium issue forced a move, allowing New Orleans real estate developer Joe Canizaro to buy the team, and move it to New Orleans for the 1984 season.

In 1984, the Breakers began the season 5-0, but went 3-10 the rest of the way, and missed the USFL playoffs.

New Orleans supported the team well, with the Breakers averaging 30,557 per game, but the USFL opted to move their schedule from the spring to the fall in 1986, and with the Saints in town, the franchise elected to move to Portland for the 1985 season.

All summer long, we’re looking back at former players for the New Orleans Breakers.

Today, defensive lineman Jeff Gaylord.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Gaylord played high school football at Shawnee Mission South in Overland Park, Kansas, before moving on to play college football at the University of Missouri, where he was an Al-American in 1981.

A fourth round pick of the Los Angeles Rams in 1982, Gaylord was cut, and signed with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, where he played four games.

In 1983, Gaylord signed with the Boston Breakers of United States Football League (USFL), starting 14 games at nose tackle.

When the Breakers moved to New Orleans for the 1984 season, Gaylord played in 13 games, before being suspended for the last three games of the season.

Gaylord was traded by the Breakers to the San Antonio Gunslingers prior to the 1985 season, where he ended his professional football career.

After football, Gaylord entered professional wrestling, working first for Bill Watts' Universal Wrestling Federation, which was formerly Mid-South Wrestling, before stints in World Class Championship Wrestling, the American Wrestling Federation, and the United States Wrestling Association, where he captured the USWA tag team titles, twice, with Jeff Jarrett.

Sadly, after Gaylord's wrestling career came to an end, he life became unraveled. In 2002, he pled guilty to two counts of bank robbery and was sentenced to two consecutive terms of seventy-eight months, before being released into supervised probation in 2008.

In 2011, Gaylord was arrested in connection with a bank robbery in Colorado and sentenced to six years in prison.

Below, watch Gaylord from his wrestling days, as he takes on his former tag partner, Jeff Jarrett: