World flag football champ ready to fight NFL talents for US Olympics spot

Darrell “Housh” Doucette, the quarterback of the US’s national flag football team, couldn’t help but be offended at the hype video circulating online shortly after the 2024 summer Olympics wrapped in Paris.

The clip showed the superstar NFL quarterback Jalen Hurts lighting a football on fire, tossing it into the torch towering over the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and igniting the Olympic flame. Then, the face of the Philadelphia Eagles turned around, stared into the camera, and deadpanned, “It’s our turn,” before text reminded viewers that men’s and women’s flag football – a younger cousin to the tackle format where Hurts plies his trade – would make its debut on the Olympics program for the 2028 LA Games.

Sitting in a coffee shop near his home town New Orleans recently, Doucette said the only way for him to interpret the video was a threat to his job. Hurts had seemingly declared his intention to call the signals for Team USA – flag football’s defending world champions – at the next summer Games.

But Doucette made clear he had no intention of simply surrendering the place he has earned for himself, in relative (but waning) anonymity, in a demonstrably different version of football that he has spent years spreading to other countries.

“I think it’s disrespectful that they just automatically assume that they’re able to just join the Olympic team because of the person that they are – they didn’t help grow this game to get to the Olympics,” Doucette said. “Give the guys who helped this game get to where it’s at their respect.”

Doucette says he can accept NFL headliners attempting to seize roster spots from him and his brethren, whose dreams of gold medal glory burn just as brightly. He just wants to make certain Hurts and his ilk know that the flag football stalwarts aren’t going down without a fight.

“We just don’t think they’re going to be able to walk on the field and make the Olympic team because of the name, right?” he said. “They still have to go out there and compete.”

Doucette’s remarks are some of the first to throw cold water on the idea of the NFL fielding a Dream Team for flag’s debut that would be akin to the squad of NBA legends who premiered at the 1992 Barcelona Games.

Hurts isn’t the only big arm to throw his helmet in the ring. On an episode of the training camp docuseries Hard Knocks, the Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams, the top draft pick in April’s draft, expressed his desire to throw for Team USA in LA – the same city where he won the Heisman trophy for college football’s best player while at Southern California.

A couple of weeks before the opening ceremony in Paris, the Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow appeared on the Pardon My Take podcast and fantasized about clinching flag football gold alongside Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson, his friends and star NFL wide receivers. “I really want to play for the Olympic flag football team,” Burrow said, echoing similar remarks from the MVP quarterback Patrick Mahomes as well as receiving-yards leader Tyreek Hill. “I think it’d be really cool.”

Doucette concedes that, under different circumstances, he’d be all for an all-star team captained by Burrow. Like virtually everyone else in New Orleans, he was thrilled to watch Burrow, Jefferson and Chase lead Louisiana State University’s football team to the college national championship in 2019. He even lives close to the high school where Chase began making a name for himself on the tackle football gridiron.

But Doucette is confident he, and players like him around the world, can more than hold their own against the NFL’s best.

Whether tucking the ball to run it himself, passing it or catching it, Doucette delivered key contributions as the US clinched the 2021 world championship in Jerusalem, with the Americans defeating Mexico in the final 44-41. It was the US’s fourth consecutive world flag football title.

Doucette then quarterbacked the national team to a gold medal at the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Alabama. And in the summer of 2023, he was designated most valuable player as the US went 7-0 to capture the Americas Continental championship in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He and the US are scheduled to travel to Lahti, Finland, to defend their world championship against 31 teams from six continents at a four-day tournament beginning 27 August.

But, earlier than all of that, Doucette collected perhaps the most famous win of his career. In 2018, he guided a championship-winning amateur squad that – on national television – topped a side made up of former NFL players.

The team of ex-professionals included the Pro Bowl running back Justin Forsett, and former Seattle Seahawks quarterback Seneca Wallace. Their coach was the four-time Olympic gold medalist sprinter Michael Johnson. And they lost by 20 points to a Doucette-led team that overwhelmed the pros not only with speed but things that aren’t quite standard in the tackle game: double passes, laterals, shifty hip movements and throws disguised as runs.

In an unforgettable sequence, Doucette was playing defense when he stopped a receiver four yards from the goal-line on a long catch and run that seemed like an easy score. Doucette’s team then intercepted Wallace and ran the ball back for a 100-yard score, punctuating the play with a spectacular downfield lateral and backflip across the goal-line.

The victory pocketed a $1m prize for Doucette’s squad, who named itself Team Fighting Cancer to honor loved ones battling the illness.

Reflecting on that day, Doucette said it was maybe the clearest demonstration for how different the 11-on-11, pads-and-helmets tackle configuration is from the seven-on-seven version, where defenders try to stop ball carriers by snatching flag strips at their hips.

“Some of the things that they do in the NFL that they call trick plays? We’re accustomed to seeing them on an everyday basis,” said Doucette, whose nickname Housh derives from his resemblance to ex-NFL player TJ Houshmandzadeh.

Doucette, 35, acknowledged that his pathway to the national team was unconventional. The son and namesake of a former New Orleans police homicide detective known to fans of the true crime docuseries The First 48, Doucette ran track and played football growing up.

One of his earliest competitive successes was winning state championships in bowling. And he didn’t pursue tackle football at the collegiate or pro levels because – at 5ft, 7in – he’s shorter than the prototype for his preferred position of quarterback.

His passion for flag football grew out of an intramural league at New Orleans’s Xavier University, where he studied. And since then, he not only proved to be skilled enough to be chosen as a “core” player for the professional men’s American Flag Football League division tentatively set to launch in 2025 with teams in Dallas, Nashville, Boston and Las Vegas.

He has also coached and conducted clinics abroad for fellow flag devotees, including in China and Mexico – whose second-ranked team is hoping to upset him in Finland.

The on-field exploits of Doucette, as well as those of women’s sensations Diana Flores of Mexico and Vanita Krouch of the US, have brought a corresponding boost in terms of social media influence and followers.

So much so that Doucette hinted at plans to unveil a line of Housh-branded merchandise, especially if things at the world championships go the US’s way.

He senses a market for it among the vibrant flag football scene to which he has belonged. But he also knows breaking out at an Olympics – before a global, mainstream audience – could come with a new football stardom that he can’t yet fathom.

Doucette made it clear he does not feel entitled to that step up. However, he does believe – firmly – that he deserves the chance to fight for those ambitions against all comers, including those with an NFL pedigree.

“It’s not that we need these guys,” Doucette said of the league’s Olympic hopefuls. “Because we’re already great with who we have.”