Anthony Alabi appears in Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the Big Bang Theory spin-off that arrived on HBO Max on Thursday 23 July. Most people who know the name know it from Netflix, where he played Moz McKellan for three seasons on Family Reunion, or from his years on NFL rosters between 2005 and 2009.
His LinkedIn profile puts him somewhere else. The entry headed Actor/Writer, covering a decade with the Gersh Agency, carries an end date of June 2026. So does the part-time job calling Texas high school football games, which he had only picked up in January. The headline at the top of the page now reads pharmaceutical and medical device sales.
His IMDb biography still tells it the simple way: he left the NFL in 2010, moved to Los Angeles, and went after acting. The dates on his own record have never been that tidy.
| Detail | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Anthony Abayomi Alabi |
| Born | 16 February 1981, San Antonio, Texas (age 45) |
| Height | 6ft 5in |
| College | TCU |
| NFL draft | 2005, fifth round, Miami Dolphins |
| Best known for | Moz McKellan in Family Reunion (Netflix) |
| Family | Married to Caroline since 2016, two children |
| Lives in | Austin, Texas |
Table of Contents
The job Anthony Alabi does now
In December 2025 he started a Substack called The Trenches and, for the five months that followed, published on it almost weekly. The subjects sit on the money side of sport: NIL deals and what happens to players who take the fast cash, flag football’s climb from the school playground to the Olympics, women’s sport as a growth market, the 2026 NFL Draft. He puts the readership at more than 85,000 across platforms, a number that comes from his own LinkedIn rather than any independent count.
In May he wrote about private equity buying into college athletics and about who gets squeezed out when it does. He listed the walk-ons, the Olympic-sport athletes, the four-year contributors who never trended online, the players who would have made a modest living in the game and then gone home to coach at a high school. “There’s no ROI on them, so they don’t make the cut,” he wrote.
Sixteen games
Miami took Alabi in the fifth round of the 2005 draft, 162nd overall, on Nick Saban’s watch. Pro Football Reference has him down for sixteen regular-season appearances, six in 2006 and ten in 2007, with no starts in either year.
That was all of it. Miami waived him in February 2008, Kansas City claimed him two days later and released him that August. Tampa Bay signed him to a reserve contract in January 2009 and let him go the following September. He never played a regular-season down for either club.
By the standards of a fifth-round pick, none of that counts as failure. He came into the draft as a two-time first-team All-Conference USA lineman out of TCU, big enough and good enough to be picked, and left the sport four and a half years later without ever having started a game. The May piece was about college athletes rather than professionals, but the description fits the kind of player he had been: on the roster, off the roster, never once the story.
Some of what he publishes reads like a man arguing with his younger self. Writing in the spring about how openly the current generation of athletes talks about what goes on in their heads, he set out what the job had asked of him instead. Toughness, he wrote, “meant staying quiet, pushing through, and never letting anything show.”
Moz McKellan, and the nine years before him
Alabi moved to Los Angeles in 2010, took a three-year Meisner course, and did not land a lead until 2019. The work in between was steady and small. He turned up for two episodes of Bosch, played Coach Spitz on and off across four years of Disney’s Raven’s Home, did single episodes of Modern Family, NCIS and Insecure, two of Shameless, and took a supporting part in Netflix’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday.
Family Reunion changed the size of the job. The Netflix comedy cast him in 2019 as Moz McKellan, a retired NFL player moving his family from Seattle to Georgia, opposite Tia Mowry and Loretta Devine. It ran three seasons and ended in 2022. He followed it with two voice roles in 2023, Zach Hammond in the Dead Space remake and the god Horus in Asgard’s Wrath II.
Then, on the public record at least, two years of nothing until the newsletter.
Two careers that never took turns
Most of what Alabi has started began while the previous thing was still running.
- A master’s degree at TCU, finished in 2007, while he was still on Miami’s roster and still playing.
- His first acting class in 2009, taken the same year Tampa Bay released him and months before he had given up on another team calling.
- Well & Often, a functional movement business he founded in July 2016, three years ahead of Family Reunion and kept going right through it.
- The Trenches, launched in December 2025, while he was still listed with a Hollywood agency.
The home details shifted too. He married Caroline in 2016 and they have two children. Los Angeles has come off his profiles, which now give Austin, Texas, though his IMDb biography has not caught up and still places him in California.
In a post in November he described a habit he was trying to break, writing that he tends to live several months ahead of wherever he actually is, “wrapped in the anxiety of mining for what’s next.”
What can be checked this week is narrow. An episode of a Big Bang Theory spin-off carrying his name went out on HBO Max, though the credit is for a single episode and no trade coverage of the premiere names him. His acting representation and his broadcasting job both carry June end dates on a profile he wrote himself. The most recent piece on The Trenches went out on 14 May.
