Casey Crawford went from playing on a team that won the Super Bowl to running a mortgage company that he expects to originate almost $8 billion in U.S. home loans this year.

Crawford founded Movement Mortgage after retiring from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He had already invested in real estate, buying houses in the off-season and then renovating and selling them quickly for a profit. His home-loan firm has doubled the dollar volume of mortgages issued each year since its 2008 inception, he said.