Just a few miles from the buzz of Nashville’s Broadway strip, past the honky-tonks and pedal taverns, sit four curling sheets inside a warehouse-like building called Tee Line. There, current and former NFL players George Kittle, T.J. Hockenson and Jared Allen are pushing the roaring game of curling into a new era.
Through the NFL offseason, and more often for the retired Allen, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, they swap the pigskin for brooms and hit the pebbled sheets. On those rinks and others across the U.S., the NFL stars are fixated.
“In football, you’re constantly having to learn, but just from being an athlete, like physically learning how to slide, sweep, the technique was a no-brainer,” says Allen.
Allen picked up the sport after making a bet in 2018 to see if he could make the Olympics in a sport he’d never played. What began as a harmless idea with his friends brought the former defensive end onto the pebbled sheets for good, but it didn’t come without its growing pains.
“The tough thing was trying to beat the learning curve of 30-plus years of these guys curling,” Allen says. “[…] I just had this mindset that if I’m gonna try to compete and be the best at something, at the end of the day, I just don’t want to be the worst, that’s for sure.”
Courtesy of The Curling Group
In a sport often known for its quiet crowds, knitting fans and sudden popularity every four years at the Olympics, Allen has become one of many who see curling as having greater potential. He’s bought into a vision, too, led by Canadian entrepreneur Nic Sulsky, CEO of The Curling Group (TCG), which looks to modernize and professionalize curling.
While Allen and the other football players may not be on the ice for it, they’re at the forefront of the world’s first professional curling league, called “Rock League,” which they hope can draw a younger, wide-ranging audience from around the globe.
“I was telling [Sulsky] some of the things that I thought curling should lean towards. He leaned in on that, and that’s kind of what sparked the conversation,” Allen says. “They took action, and when he came back to me, he was telling me about the team he had already assembled. That was when I knew I wanted to get in and be heavily involved.”
Rock League will see six global franchise teams compete, with an equal split of five men and five women, including mixed play. The captains for the teams include Milan Cortina-bound Team USA mixed-doubles curler Korey Dropkin, Olympic gold medalist and Brad Jacobs (Canada) and world champions Bruce Mouat (Scotland), Alina Pätz (Switzerland), Rachel Homan (Canada), as well as Chinami Yoshida (Japan).
San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle is part of a trio of NFL stars investing in Rock League. | Courtesy of The Curling Group
The league is scheduled to begin in April 2026, two months after the Winter Olympics, with a seven-day launch event in Toronto. Then, it will expand to a five-stop 2027 season, with the aim of a fully-fledged schedule across the world in 2028.
At Rock League events, fans can expect loud crowds and music––and importantly to Sulsky, less knitting and shushing, as he recalled at his first curling event, the 2023 Canadian Championship, known as The Brier, in London, Ontario.
“There’s going to be a real festival surrounding curling. It’s not just going to be about the events on the ice; we’re going to have an awesome rock party,” Sulsky says.
“I was having an electric conversation about curling during The Brier, and someone turned around and shushed us. I was like, ‘this f—— sport has to change.’ I want the shushing to forever be a thing of the past. I want the knitting to be gone. … Curling needs new energy and a new demographic of fans. It was ripe for an injection of fun, excitement and energy.”
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In the U.S., outside of the brief spotlight during the Olympics, curling can hardly be considered anywhere near a mainstream sport. While the NFLers and Sulsky aren’t necessarily out to make it one, they see the possibility of making it a fully-fledged professional and lucrative product.
In Canada, curling events are among the most-watched sports broadcasts, yet the sport is not as widely available worldwide. As such, it is challenging for countries to build off Olympic momentum.
Now, the hope is to get not just Rock League, but TCG’s other properties, including the five-stop Grand Slam of Curling that it purchased from Canadian broadcaster Rogers Sportsnet, on American and international television while producing accessible and engaging content around the sport’s top athletes.
That’s where the power of celebrity and passion from Allen, Hockenson and Kittle come in. With them at the forefront, and even some help from Jason and Kylie Kelce, who recently tried curling with Dropkin at the U.S. Olympic Trials, there’s an opportunity to push the sport beyond its usual boundaries.
With the smallest movements defining results in a curling game, and the strength needed to sweep and guide stones, football players been pulled in—and now, they want to bring the game forward with them.
“It’s an addictive sport, there’s so many nuances, so if you’re a detail-oriented person, and you like challenges and you like to push yourself, curling is the greatest sport, because there’s constant challenges, even for the best players,” Allen says. “It never gets easy, right? Your willingness to take difficult shots goes up, you’re paying more attention to the ice and you’re totally over analyzing all the ice changes. There’s just so many details.”
In April 2025, Kittle and Hockenson found themselves on the Tee Line curling sheets with some of the world’s best curlers as part of the inaugural TCG All-Star Game. In November, Allen skipped a team in the first Grand Slam of Curling event in the U.S. in Lake Tahoe, Calif., and provided a viral moment when he broke a broom while sweeping.
Their investment comes two-fold; with their commitment to improving their skills and learning the game, they have been able to embrace what a professionalized sport could mean to curling as they hope to further access the American and Asian markets.
“It’s so important and it’s so great to see that legit professional athletes have an interest in curling, they want to try it, they want to back it and support it,” Dropkin says. “Jared being involved with everything he has given into curling is great. He curled pretty much every day for a few years to try to be the best in the sport and he got to be pretty dang good. It’s awesome to have them back us.
“With Kittle and Hockenson, having guys out on the ice it’s fun to see, especially when they’re struggling. It’s good for people to know that curling is not easy, and that high level athletes aren’t going to have a simple time.”
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Curling in the U.S. has had a chance to grow before, but USA Curling missed it, according to Allen and Dropkin. When John Schuster led Team USA to men’s gold at the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018, the sport and USA Curling didn’t cash in on that potential boost for the sport’s popularity.
“They weren’t in a position to take advantage of it, they didn’t have the resources or the connections to make John Schuster and Team USA a household name,” Allen says. “You can go back and look at snowboarding and Shaun White, I remember when that came into the Olympics, and they were able to catapult that … and snowboarding has blown up like crazy.”
Jared Allen was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame last year. | Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images
Part of that issue, according to Sulsky and many familiar with the curling space, is the connection fans struggle to feel with athletes. Not only are they elevating content and distribution pathways for Rock League, the franchise model will allow fans to connect to a team with a logo, a brand and a message, unlike the traditional curling makeup of teams being named after their skip, such as “Team Dropkin.”
New professional sports leagues are popping up every year, but Rock League is looking to change the sport at its core. While the Indian Premier League’s rise powered cricket’s professionalization and SailGP has done so for sailing, few sports have fundamentally changed for a new era.
For curling, they’re doing it with heavy celebrity firepower and investment from Kittle, Hockenson and Allen while bringing the world’s best on board, highlighted by 18 athletes from the Beijing 2022 Olympic medal-winning teams—whereas the recently formed LIV Golf’s efforts featured just 15 of the top 100 golfers in the World Golf Rankings in its inaugural season.
Rock League will open with a prize pool of $250,000 and TCG events have established distribution services worldwide, including Rogers Sportsnet and a non-restricted global stream with exclusive talent and content.
“If we’re going to innovate the sport, and we’re going to create a new star system of the curlers themselves, which is really vital, the events have to be fun and fans need to want to be at those events,” Sulsky says, “I think we’re starting to evolve the content that we produce and that it has to be available and awesome.
“One of the challenges curling has had historically is that the greatest curling series on earth, the Grand Slam of Curling, was owned by a Canadian media company that only cares about Canadian business.”
Korey Dropkin will compete for Team USA in the mixed doubles event before joining Rock League. | Robert Deutsch-Imagn Images
As much as Rock League will change the game with adjusted rules and a different layout than the traditional four-sheet setup to make the sport more engaging, keeping the core of the sport remains a focus for TCG. The Grand Slam of Curling events, while elite, have often been a testing ground for rule evolutions, and will continue to be, but keeping the integrity under World Curling’s international standards for the Olympics and world championships is critical.
The launch of Rock League will bring excitement to the sport, but everyone involved knows just how important Olympic success will be, especially for Dropkin and his mixed-doubles partner, Cory Thiesse.
A U.S. medal on the pebbled sheets would give the sport added exposure, but there is confidence that the Olympic momentum can translate into Rock League, regardless of his podium finish.
“The Olympics are when curling is at its highest. Even before I was curling, I always watched, so it’s going to be huge to keep that momentum,” Allen says.
“Somebody associated with the Grand Slam of Curling and Rock League is going to win a gold medal. It’s a given, and now we’re gonna have a platform for them to go out and be exposed and paraded in all the best ways for exposure and for our exposure as a league and as a sport, and hopefully to drive revenue.”
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