Michael Carter II plays safety for the Philadelphia Eagles, and two weeks ago he threw a baby shower for 40 mothers in Philly who are on Medicaid, which is not a sentence anybody expects to write about a fifth round defensive back in the middle of a season.

It was not a check e's charity either. It was his own event, run by his own foundation, in his own city, and more than 100 people came through the door.

They gave out car seats and portable cribs and diapers, and then they sat the families down with health education plans meant to connect them to care that keeps going long after everybody has gone home, which is the part that gets skipped when people read about something like this. A car seat is a car seat and anybody can buy one. A plan that still has a mother seeing a doctor six months from now is harder to hand out and worth considerably more.

He also sat on a panel about fatherhood, which is not how most defensive backs spend an off day.

Carter came out of Duke in the fifth round of the 2021 draft, and fifth round defensive backs generally spend their careers trying to stay on a roster rather than building anything, and he has spent part of his putting his name on something that has nothing to do with football.

The reason for all of it is one person.

His wife Alli is a labor and delivery nurse.

She spends her working life inside the room where all of it happens, with women who are hours away from becoming mothers, and she watches some of them arrive with everything ready and some of them arrive with nothing at all, which means he married somebody who sees that gap up close on every shift she works.

So he went and built something around it. The Michael Carter II Foundation started in November of 2025, he started it with his parents Donna and Michael Carter Sr., and the way the foundation itself describes the goal is that no mother should enter motherhood feeling unprepared or invisible.

That event in Philly was the third one this year, and across the three of them they have handed out more than 15,000 supplies to families who needed them, and back in July he and Alli ran one in Georgia, where he is from, and gave away 3,000 diapers. The same foundation has put 5,000 dollars into his old school's basketball program and helped assemble 600 trauma kits for first responders.

This week the NFL Players Association made him their Community MVP for Week 8 and put 10,000 dollars into the foundation, which also makes him eligible for their biggest community award and another 100,000 on top of it.

Be straight about the size of it, because forty mothers is forty mothers, and it does not fix maternal health care in this country, and nobody involved has claimed otherwise.

But forty families in Philadelphia went home with a car seat they did not have that morning, and the man who paid for it married the nurse who has spent years watching them arrive without one.

Doug Williams threw four touchdown passes in one Super Bowl quarter, becoming the first Black starting quarterback to achieve this.

Just a few years before, he was out of the NFL.

He managed this while playing on an injured leg.

Here’s how it all happened.

Williams grew up in night, legendary Grambling coach Eddie Robinson called to offer him a scholarship. They had never met before, but Williams accepted.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers picked him 17th overall, making him the first quarterback chosen in the first round that year. As their starter, the Bucs reached the playoffs three times in five seasons.

But then things fell apart.

He asked Tampa Bay for a new contract worth $600,000 a year, but the team wouldn’t offer more than $400,000. So he left.

That spring, his wife passed away suddenly. Their daughter was only about two and a half months old.

He asked his mother to raise his baby, and she agreed. He explained why.

"The child needed a mother."

No NFL team called, so he signed with the USFL, a new spring league. Within a couple of years, that league folded too.

Then Joe Gibbs called. Gibbs had coached him in Tampa Bay and was now leading Washington, the team now called the Washington Commanders. He brought Williams in as a backup.

In his second season with Washington, the starting quarterback got injured. Williams stepped in and led the team all the way to the Super Bowl against the Denver Broncos.

The game started badly. Washington fell behind 10-0. Then Williams twisted his leg while planting for a throw and had to leave the game.

He came back in the second quarter.

What happened next became one of the greatest quarters in football history. Washington scored 35 points onjust 18 plays. Williams completed 9 of 11 passes for 228 yards and four touchdowns in that quarter.r.

Washington won 42-10. Williams threw for 340 yards, which was a Super Bowl record at the time, and was named MVP.

Later, he said he had only one thing on his mind.

"I went out on that field with one thing in mind, and that was finding a way to win."

Here’s the truth. You might have heard that a reporter asked him that week how long he had been a Black quarterback, but that’s not what happened.

A reporter who was there said the real question was about when race started to matter to people. Williams misheard it, repeated it, and that’s how the myth began.

Years later, he returned to Grambling and took over as head coach after Eddie Robinson.

He lost his job, his league, and his wife within a few years. Then he played the greatest quarter of his life on the biggest stage.

Warren Moon was the MVP of the Rose Bowl, and not one NFL team drafted him.

So he went to Canada and won five straight championships.

Then he became the first undrafted quarterback ever voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Here is the whole thing.

Moon grew up in Los West Los Angeles College, a junior college, and then went to the University of Washington.

In his final season, he led Washington to the Rose Bowl and beat Michigan 27-20. He was named the game's MVP.

Then the draft came, and no one called his name.

Back then, many coaches and scouts believed Black players couldn't handle the quarterback position.

Moon was not interested in playing anything else. He explained it later.

"It was an opportunity to showcase my skills and to keep playing quarterback, I hadn't ever played any other position."

The Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League gave him that chance. Nobody there tried to turn him into a receiver or a defensive back.

Edmonton won the Grey Cup, Canada's version of the Super Bowl, in his first season.

Then they won it again. And again. And again. And again.

Five straight titles, a record in that league. Moon was named Grey Cup MVP twice.

He did not exactly feel like he was in exile, either.

"I was really happy playing in Edmonton, I signed a long-term contract there, I genuinely loved it."

Now the NFL wanted him. The Houston Oilers beat out other teams to sign him at 27, six years after every team in the league had passed.

He made nine Pro Bowls. He led the NFL in passing yards two seasons in a row, with 4,689 yards and then 4,690. He kept playing until he was 44.

He finished with nearly 50,000 passing yards in the NFL alone.

When he became eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, it took one try. He was the first undrafted quarterback to be inducted, and the first Black quarterback, too.

Canada got there first. The Canadian Football Hall of Fame inducted him five years earlier. He is the only player in both.

Former NFL receiver Nate Burleson put it this way.

"Warren Moon paved the way, and it's not said enough."

Here is the honest part. For all of that, Moon never played in a Super Bowl. Not with the Houston Oilers, and not with any of the three teams after that.

And nobody can give him back the six years the NFL threw away.

But the league that skipped him on draft day eventually had to put his bust in Canton.

And the league that took a chance on him got five championships out of it.

Grant Wilson had not started a game at Indiana. He came in at halftime today and threw the touchdown that won it.

Indiana beat Minnesota 23 to 16 in overtime. Josh Hoover started and was struggling, so Curt Cignetti went to his backup for the second half, and in overtime Wilson wn pass to end it.

That game was also absurd on its own. Minnesota hit a 60 yard field goal with 24 seconds left to go in front. Indiana answered with a 60 yard field goal of its own with 2 seconds left. Then overtime, then Wilson.

Now here is the part that makes him worth 500 words.

This is Grant Wilson's seventh season of college football. Seventh. It is also his last one.

He started at Fordham in 2021 and 2022. He transferred to Old Dominion and started 14 games there. Then in the second week of 2024, against East Carolina, he dislocated his elbow and tore tendons in his triceps and his wrist.

He went into the transfer portal after that.

Several schools offered him a chance to go be their starting quarterback.

He turned all of them down and went to Indiana to be a backup.

His explanation was short. It is hard to turn down Curt Cignetti.

So he sat. And while he sat, third on the depth chart, he spent his time teaching Fernando Mendoza how to play the position. Mendoza went on to win the Heisman Trophy, and the way Mendoza described him was as a full time quarterback fundamentals coach.

Then the NCAA granted Wilson a seventh year. He beat out Tyler Cherry for the backup job again this fall, and he went right back into the same role he had been in all along, which is the one where you prepare all week to play zero snaps.

Here is how he talks about that role.

"I know my role."

He says he embraces it every single day. He calls the whole thing a long journey.

Cignetti says Wilson is as good a team player as anybody on that roster, and that he probably wants to coach when he is finished.

A man who could have spent the last two years starting somewhere else chose instead to hold a clipboard, teach a Heisman winner his footwork, and wait.

Today they finally handed him the thing, in overtime, with everything on it.

He threw a touchdown and Indiana won.

Moonlight Graham played exactly one game in the major leagues, and he never got to swing the bat.

Then he spent the next 50 years as a doctor in one small town in Minnesota.

You might know him from a movie. The real story is even better.

Here's the whole thing.

Archibald teville, NC (one of nine kids). Played baseball at UNC and was fast. Fast enough to be known as Moonlight.

He also wanted to be a doctor. So he studied medicine at Maryland while he chased baseball in the minor leagues.

One summer day, the New York Giants were beating Brooklyn 10 to 0. In the bottom of the eighth inning, they sent Graham out to play right field.

Nobody hit the ball to him.

In the top of the ninth, he was on deck. The batter in front of him popped out, ending the inning.

He played one more inning in right field. The Giants won 11 to 1.

And that was it. He never played in the major leagues again.

He spent a few more seasons in the minors. Then he moved west for his health and settled in Chisholm, Minnesota, a mining town on the Iron Range.

He cared for the miners and their families.

Then he became the doctor for the Chisholm public schools. He kept that job for more than 40 years. He was also the team doctor for the high school sports teams.

He passed away in Chisholm at 82.

After he was gone, his friends started a memorial fund in his name to help pay for a local day care center.

Years later, a writer named W.P. Kinsella found his name in the Baseball Encyclopedia. One game. Zero at-bats. He wrote Graham into a novel called Shoeless Joe.

That book became the movie Field of Dreams. Burt Lancaster played Doc Graham.

Then the town did something too. They started a scholarship in his name. Every year it goes to one boy and one girl graduating from Chisholm High School, for service to their school and their community.

Here is the honest part. The movie took some liberties. It showed him batting right-handed. He was a lefty.

And the real Graham did not always tell that day like a fairy tale. In an interview about the Giants late in his life, he put it plainly.

"But I didn't get any breaks there."

He even remembered getting up to bat once and drawing a walk. The records say he never batted.

But maybe he never needed that at-bat.

He got one inning in the big leagues, and half a century of taking care of a town that still remembers his name.

Mike Leach once got asked about Halloween candy and gave an answer people are still posting five years later.

It is going around again today, the way it goes around every single October.

The setting was October of 2021. Mississippi State had just beaten Vanderbilt 45 to 6, h, and somebody asked him about candy about a week before Halloween.

He had thoughts.

"I mean, I completely hate Candy Corn."

That is the line that everybody remembers. But the rest of the answer is the good part, because he did not stop there. He had a whole system.

Gummy bears were in, with a condition. They had to be the Haribo ones.

Then he got into the ones nobody defends anymore.

"The other thing I like is when they used to have the Sprees in a box. Outstanding. You've got to go to the dollar store to find it, but I do."

A head coach in the SEC, on camera, telling America where to buy boxed Sprees.

Then he zoomed out and gave the state of the entire candy industry.

"There's still candy innovation, although a while back I found that Europe had better candy than we do overall."

And he gave credit where he felt credit was owed.

"They have those nerds clusters, which is new, which is good."

For chocolate, his pick was Almond Joy.

Nobody handed him a football question there and he did not treat it like one to get through. He gave candy the same attention he gave an opponent. He had it ranked, he had opinions on the packaging, and he knew which store carried the candy he wanted and he went there himself.

Here is what happened next. People started mailing candy to the Mississippi State football office. That is according to Dave Emerick, who was an associate athletic director there at the time.

Be straight about why this one lasted. Leach was the coach who held press conferences about pirates and Bigfoot and how he would plan a wedding, and he answered every one of those questions exactly as seriously as he answered questions about third down. He was not doing a bit. He actually had a position on boxed Sprees.

He was a rugby player at BYU who went to law school, coached a season in Finland, and then helped build the offense that most of college football runs today. He won at Texas Tech in Lubbock, at Washington State in Pullman, and at Mississippi State in Starkville, three places that were not supposed to win like that.

Mike Leach passed away in December of 2022. He was 61.

And every Halloween since, somebody pulls up a clip of him explaining the Haribo rule, and the whole thing starts over again.

Zion Grady plays defensive end for Ohio State, he wears number 9, and tonight he plays at USC.

His father's side of the family calls itself the Grady Bunch. They go to his games and they make their signs by hand, and one of those signs says SERVING SACKS.

His aunt Angel is the hoto she sent us.

And Zion carries his father with him onto the field, because his father's name is tattooed on his arm.

Robert Grady needed a new heart.

He was on the transplant list, waiting at a hospital in Atlanta for the one that could save him, and he passed away in 2010 before a match was found.

Zion was 3 years old.

A boy that age does not get to keep many memories. What Zion kept was the name, and what he has done with it since is the reason this family wanted somebody to tell you about him.

He decided in the ninth grade, when he was about 14, that when the day came to announce where he would play college football, he would announce it on his father's birthday.

Then he went out and earned the right to have that announcement matter. At Charles Henderson High School in Troy, Alabama he put up 108 tackles and 22 sacks as a sophomore and was named the state's 5A Lineman of the Year. He added 87 tackles, 11 sacks and an interception as a junior. He had 14 more sacks as a senior. Alabama wanted him. Auburn wanted him. Florida State wanted him.

When the day finally came, he sat down in front of a camera and committed on Robert Grady's birthday, exactly the way the 14 year old had planned it.

"It means a lot to me."

He said he did it to celebrate him. He later flipped to Ohio State and signed there in December of 2024.

Be straight about what he has already done, because it gets undersold. Ohio State signs five star pass rushers every single year, and most true freshmen there never see a meaningful snap.

Zion played 106 of them last season, which was the third most of any defensive end on that roster. Only 15 of those came in the first four games, which means he spent the season climbing.

He is in the rotation now, and there is a starting job open in front of him.

Ohio State is ranked second in the country.

So there is a homemade sign out there with SERVING SACKS cut into it, and a woman holding it up outside a stadium with the rest of Robert Grady's family gathered around her in scarlet, watching a kid wear their last name on his back.

Every one of them turns out for him.

And the one who cannot is the one Zion carries out there.

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Gunner Stockton is the starting quarterback at Georgia, and today he plays Florida in Atlanta.

That last part matters to his family more than it matters to anybody else in the building.

Georgia and Florida have played this game in Jacksonville for most of a century. This year is being renovated, so for the first time ever the two of them are meeting in Atlanta instead.

Gunner Stockton has a reason to be fine with that.

In 2010 these teams played in Jacksonville and Georgia lost 34 to 31 in overtime. Georgia had been down 21 to 7 at halftime and clawed all the way back. Then they threw an interception on their first possession of overtime, and Florida kicked a 37 yard field goal to finish it.

Lawrence Stockton was at that game. He was Gunner's grandfather.

He had a heart attack at the stadium, and he passed away in the parking lot after the loss.

His wife Suzanne told the story to DawgNation last October. He said something about Todd Grantham, who was Georgia's defensive coordinator that season, and then he collapsed.

Gunner Stockton was 6 years old.

He is 22 now and he is the one taking the snaps. He grew up in Tiger, Georgia, a small place up in Rabun County in the north Georgia mountains where his family has been for generations, and he waited three years behind other quarterbacks before the job was his. Last season he started all 14 games and was the most valuable player of the SEC Championship Game.

Here is what he has said about carrying this into the game.

"It means a lot. My family, we have some history with this game."

And this.

"Unfortunately, I lost my granddad."

He told Mark Schlabach of ESPN last year, back when this was still a Jacksonville game, that every time Georgia went down there he wanted to beat Florida badly.

Be straight about it. A football game does not give anybody back, and nothing that happens this afternoon undoes a parking lot in 2010. Florida did nothing to Lawrence Stockton, and the loudest version of this story is the one other people tell about Gunner, not the one he tells about himself.

But think about the timing of it.

A 6 year old boy lost his grandfather at a Georgia Florida game in Jacksonville. Sixteen years later that boy is the quarterback of the Georgia Bulldogs, and the one year he has the job and the whole thing in front of him, the game picks itself up and moves to Atlanta.

Somebody in that family has been going to this game a long time.

Today Gunner is the one playing in it, in a building where none of it ever happened.

Ahmad Hardy is expected to play football today against Arkansas with a bullet still inside his leg.

He has not played a down this season. Here is what the last six months took from him.

Ahmad Hardy grew up in Oma, Mississippi and played at Lawrence County High School in he ran for 2,442 yards and 27 touchdowns.

He went to Louisiana Monroe and as a true freshman he carried it 237 times for 1,351 yards and 13 touchdowns. Sun Belt Freshman of the Year.

Then he transferred to Missouri, and last season he did this.

He led the entire SEC in rushing. Sixteen touchdowns. More than six yards every time he touched it. Consensus All-American, SEC Newcomer of the Year, first team All-SEC, Doak Walker finalist.

On November 15 against Mississippi State he ran for 300 yards in one game. Only one other player in the history of Missouri football has ever done that.

He was 19 years old.

Then in May, outside a concert in Laurel, Mississippi, he was hit in the leg.

What it did to him is the part that is hard to read. It shattered the top of his femur, which is the largest bone in the human body and the one a running back lives on. Surgeons put a rod in it.

And the bullet is still in there. It was never taken out.

He has spent the six months since then learning that leg over again, on a femur with a rod running through it and a piece of metal in it that was never meant to be there.

Walking without a limp first. Then jogging. Then running. Then the thing that actually decides whether a running back is still a running back, which is planting at full speed and going the other direction without thinking about it.

He came back to practice this week.

Be straight about what today actually is. He is not starting. ESPN reported he is in line for a handful of carries and nothing more. Eliah Drinkwitz has been openly careful about all of it and said there is no blueprint for bringing a player back from this, because there is not one.

Missouri has also been fine without him. Jamal Roberts has led the SEC at 124 rushing yards a game in his place, and there is no guarantee Hardy is ever the same player he was in November.

So this is not a triumph. It is a 20 year old getting four or five carries in a conference game.

But six months ago a bullet broke the biggest bone he has, and today he is going to put a helmet on and go let a grown defense hit him on purpose.

The bullet is coming with him.

East Tennessee State plays Tennessee Tech on Saturday in Halloween helmets, and they are the best looking helmets of the weekend.

A jack-o-lantern E with bats in it. A skeleton pirate carrying a candy bucket. A mummy pirate carrying the same candy bucket.

Here is the part worth e State is in Johnson City, up in the Appalachian mountains, a few hundred miles from the nearest ocean in any direction.

And they call themselves the Buccaneers.

Pirates. In the mountains.

The school opened in 1911 as a teachers college and the teams were called the Teachers. In 1935 that changed and they became the Buccaneers, and the student newspaper there has spent decades admitting that nobody is completely certain how it happened.

What they have instead is a story.

The story goes that geologists found an underground river running near the campus and called it Pirate Creek. It was said to have once connected all the way to the Atlantic Ocean through a long winding route underneath the mountains.

And a buccaneer named Jean Paul LeBucque is said to have found that river and used it to hide his gold.

He is said to have been trapped in a cave-in that sealed the route off for good.

That is the legend the nickname comes from. A pirate who hid treasure under a mountain in Tennessee.

Be straight about it. There is no evidence that any of this ever happened. The student paper ran a column on it in 2004 and the writer came right out and said the name Jean Paul LeBucque sounds too good to be true, which it does. There is no documented pirate, no verified river to the Atlantic, and no gold.

It is a ghost story that a university decided to put on its letterhead.

And then they committed to it completely.

The first mascot in school history was not even a pirate. It was a live goat in a cape named Captain Kidd who worked the sideline in the 1950s. After the goat came the first Bucky. In 1980 they brought out Pepper the Parrot at homecoming, and for a stretch in the early 90s Bucky and Pepper worked the games together, Bucky with the swords and Pepper handling the comedy.

So on Saturday afternoon a team from the Appalachian mountains is going to run onto a field in skeleton pirate helmets, named for a man nobody can prove existed, who supposedly hid gold in a river nobody has ever found.

And they are good. East Tennessee State is 6 and 2 and just went to VMI and won 38 to 0.

A school with a made up pirate, a retired goat and a parrot is 6 and 2 and has the best helmets in the country this week.

Devin Booker turns 30 today, and he has never been the obvious guy in the room.

He did not start a single game in college. Not one, all season.

Kentucky went 38 and 1 that year and Booker came off the bench behind the Harrison twins for every game of it. He played 21 minutes a oints. His best game all year was 19.

He was named SEC Sixth Man of the Year and then went 13th in the draft.

Now go back further, because the better story is his father.

Melvin Booker was a point guard at Missouri. As a senior he was Big Eight Player of the Year, he took Missouri through conference play at 14 and 0, he got them to an Elite Eight, and he was named a first team All-American.

Then in the 1994 draft nobody took him.

He went undrafted and spent the next fourteen years as a professional basketball player anyway. Italy. Turkey. Russia. Back to Italy.

He played 32 games in the NBA in his entire life. Thirty two.

Devin grew up in Michigan with his mother Veronica Gutiérrez. His parents never married but they raised him together, and he spent most of his childhood with her.

Then the summer after his freshman year of high school, Melvin went and recruited his own son.

Here is how Melvin describes it. He approached it the way a college coach would. He was selling a 14 year old on moving 1,000 miles to Moss Point, Mississippi to live with a father he had not lived with.

Veronica did not want to do it.

"Mom didn't want to send her son away from her for the next three years."

She let him go anyway.

Devin called it a culture shock. He also said this about what it did to him and his mother.

"It didn't change."

And that same year, 2011, Melvin Booker took a job as an assistant coach at Moss Point High School.

Be straight about it. This was not some hardship story. Devin had two parents who were both there, and a father who had played at a high level and knew exactly what to teach him. Plenty of kids would take that deal.

But think about what Melvin was actually doing.

A man who was the best player in his conference, who nobody drafted, who spent fourteen years in gyms in four countries for 32 NBA games, looked at his kid and decided he was going to do everything in his power to make sure it went differently.

Today that kid is 30 years old. He has played his entire career with the Phoenix Suns and he got to an NBA Finals.

He has already started more NBA games than his father ever played.

Budda Baker walked into a press conference today in a full costume and let reporters ask him whether he is about to be traded.

That is the video going around today. It is funny and you should go watch the whole thing.

Here is what is underneath it.

Budda Baker is a safety for He is 5 foot 10 and 195 pounds, which is small for the job, and he has made a living running downhill into people bigger than him.

He is in his tenth NFL season. He has spent every single day of it in Arizona.

Eight Pro Bowls. Seven of them in a row.

And in those ten years, the Arizona Cardinals have not won one playoff game with him on the roster.

Not one.

He grew up in Bellevue, Washington and played at Bellevue High School. He stayed home for college and played for the Washington Huskies. Arizona took him in the second round in 2017, 36th overall, and he has been there ever since.

In 2023 he asked them to trade him. They did not do it. He stayed and kept making Pro Bowls.

Earlier this week he told ESPN that he is happy to be a Cardinal and that he hopes to stay, and that he also understands the business side of it.

The Cardinals are 2 and 5. The trade deadline is November 10. They have two games before it gets here, and his name is in every conversation about it.

And today, with all of that sitting on the table in front of him, he walked up to the microphone in a costume he had been using to scare his own teammates.

Here is the entire answer he gave about his future.

"Just living in the present."

And then this.

"Just focus on playing against the Dallas Cowboys and trying to get a W at their stadium."

Be straight about it. This is not bravery. He is a 30 year old safety having a good season, 3.5 sacks and a team leading four tackles for loss, on a team going nowhere, and there is a real chance he is wearing different colors in two weeks. A costume does not change one thing about that.

But think about what ten years of this actually looks like from the inside.

Ten years of standing at that microphone and answering for a franchise that has not won him anything. Eight trips to the Pro Bowl with nothing to show for a single one of them. Losing seasons stacked on losing seasons, and his name in the rumors every October.

He could have walked in there grim today. He could have given them nothing.

Instead he put on a costume and went and scared his teammates with it first.

Joe Flacco of the Cincinnati Bengals just offered to pay Caleb Williams fine out of his own pocket.

Here is what the fine is for.

Caleb Williams has been wearing cleats made by a company called Caddix. The NFL fined him 11,941 dollars for it after the Bears won at Atlanta in ng he did in the game. For the logo on the side of his shoe.

NFL uniform rules let three brands appear on a player's feet. Nike, Adidas and Under Armour. Those are the three with league partnerships. Anything else has to be taped over.

Caddix was founded in 2015. The thing it sells is a stud design meant to cut down the rotational stress that shredded knees and ankles take every time a man plants his foot and turns.

Williams says he had been trying to get out of Nike and into these for about a year.

"They're smart cleats, they're science cleats, and they've been working for me."

He says he is focused on his health. He says they have helped his joints. He estimates about 40 NFL players already wear the brand.

And here is the part that changes how this reads. Williams has no contract with Caddix. Nobody is paying him to wear them. He is eating an 11,941 dollar fine for a shoe he bought into on his own.

That is when Flacco said this.

"If Caleb gets fined again for wearing Caddix, I'll pay the fine myself."

Jack Rasmussen, who founded the company, said he would cover it too.

Be straight about who is talking. Flacco is one of four athlete advisors to Caddix and has worn the cleats for years. He was the first NFL player to put them on, back in 2024. CBS has described him as an investor in it. He is not a neutral bystander here, the company went and put a billboard up in Chicago about all this, and every bit of this is good for Caddix.

So take the sales pitch out and look at what is left.

Flacco is in his 19th NFL season. Nineteen years of getting hit, getting up, and finding out in his forties what all of it costs. A man with that many miles on him has opinions about what is under his feet, and he is willing to spend his own money backing a 24 year old on another team who reached the same conclusion.

Williams has appealed the fine. Caddix has a hearing with the league on November 10. The Bears play at Seattle on Monday and he says he is not taping anything over.

Strip out the brands and the billboard and the sentence underneath it is this.

A quarterback is being fined for wearing something he believes protects his knees.

Will Straton is a linebacker at Oregon, and Oregon plays Northwestern on Saturday.

Nobody else on that roster got there the way he did.

Coming out of high school in Hawaii, Straton had no scholarship offers. Not one. Not from Oregon, not from anybody else.

So he enrolled at ular student.

He said he was willing to do "whatever it takes." Everybody says that. He meant it in a way that involved a tree.

Here is how he put it later.

"I was a regular student with an academic scholarship, and I was sneaking in."

Sneaking in meant exactly that. Back in 2023, when the Oregon practice fields still had trees on them, Straton found one near a small ramp and parked himself under it.

And he watched Oregon practice.

And he wrote it all down.

Think about the logistics for a second. He was not on the team, so he could not be at practice. He went to class like any other student, then went and sat in the dirt under a tree so he could learn a defense he had no business learning.

He kept a notebook. He was teaching himself the defense of a team he was not on, from under a tree, so that if he ever got a tryout he would already know the calls.

That went on until Kenny Farr spotted him.

Farr runs equipment at Oregon. He chased Straton down and took the notebook off him.

Then he handed the notebook to the coaching staff.

Dan Lanning read it. Two of the lines in there went like this.

"This guy's not very fast."

"This quarterback always stares down his target."

A kid sitting under a tree had written scouting reports on Oregon's own players.

Lanning, on whether the two of them ever actually met that day: "I don't think I met Will that day."

A connection to Tosh Lupoi, Oregon's defensive coordinator at the time, got him into walk-on tryouts. He made the team.

That was 2023. He has been on an Oregon roster every season since.

Ally Osborne wrote the whole thing up for Sports Illustrated in April, and the notebook is the part everybody remembers.

Be straight about where it has actually gotten him. Straton is not a star. He has one tackle this season in two appearances, and most Saturdays he is on special teams or he is standing on the sideline in a helmet he does not use. Lanning called him one of the production leaders at linebacker in the spring and that has not turned into real snaps yet.

But that is sort of the entire point of him.

Here is what Lanning says about him now.

"He's earned everything that's come his direction."

They took the notebook away from him three years ago.

The kid who wrote it is still on the team.

Caleb Williams had last weekend off. The Chicago Bears do not play again until November 2.

So he flew to Madison, Wisconsin.

Not for an appearance and not for money. USC was playing Wisconsin on Saturday, and Caleb Williams went to USC, so he went and watched his old team play.
et. He filmed himself on the sideline like somebody at his first game. He got a picture with Marcus Allen.

And somewhere on the walk in, he came up on a lemonade stand some neighborhood kids had set up near Camp Randall.

He stopped.

There is video of it. A folding table on a Madison sidewalk, a crowd of kids and parents three deep around it, and the first overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft standing in the middle of them waiting his turn like everybody else.

Be straight about one part. People are saying he left those kids a huge tip. Nobody has confirmed any amount and the only place that number lives is a social media post, so we are not going to repeat it.

What is actually on the video is that he stopped.

Caleb Williams won the Heisman Trophy at USC in 2022 and went first overall in 2024. In between he got taken apart by people who had never met him. The painted nails. The pink phone. Going into the stands to cry with his mother after a loss. There were grown adults on television arguing about whether he had the personality to lead a football team.

Two years later he had a weekend with nothing on it.

He spent it in a Trojans jacket in Wisconsin, watching his old school get beaten 24 to 7, standing on a sidewalk buying lemonade off a card table.

At halftime somebody spotted him talking to Jayden Maiava, the quarterback who has his old job, while USC was down 10 to 7.

He did not have to be at any of it.

Cam Boozer has been an NBA player for eight days.

Last night in Portland he finished with 18 points, 12 rebounds and 12 assists, and Memphis won by 21.

Twelve assists. From a 6 foot 8 forward who is 19. That is a triple double.

Only one player in NBA history has ever done it n 2022. And Boozer is the youngest big man in the history of the league to do it, full stop.

That is the number going around today. Here is the one that should.

In 2007 his big brother Carmani was an infant with sickle cell anemia.

Carlos Boozer and his wife CeCe both carried the trait. Doctors told them the best chance at an actual cure was a stem cell transplant using cord blood from a sibling who was free of it and a perfect match for him.

They did not have that sibling.

So CeCe went through IVF and doctors screened the embryos one by one. Ten came back usable. Two of those ten were a match for Carmani.

They put both of them in.

Those two embryos were born on July 18, 2007 in Salt Lake City, where their dad was playing at the time. Cameron came out first. Cayden came out second.

Doctors took the stem cells out of the twins umbilical cords right there in the delivery room.

Carmani went through two rounds of chemotherapy to wipe out his own system, took the transplant, and spent 40 days in a hospital. In May of 2008 he was declared cured.

Be straight about what that decision cost the people who made it.

CeCe said it out loud in a documentary years later. "You feel like you're having a baby for the wrong reason."

Carlos has said there were times he felt they did the right thing and times he felt they did not.

Carmani says it the plainest of anybody. He says they were only born because he was sick.

Then he says they saved his life.

Those two babies grew up in Miami and went to Christopher Columbus High School together. Cam was the Gatorade National Player of the Year twice. They went to Duke together, where their father went, and Cam averaged 22.5 points and 10.2 rebounds and was named National Player of the Year as a freshman. He broke bones around his right eye in the Elite Eight loss to UConn and refused surgery on it.

Memphis took him third overall in June.

His very first NBA game, eight days ago, was against Utah. The team his father was playing for in the city where he was born.

Be straight about the basketball too. It has been eight days. He is 19, he was on a floor with Damian Lillard and Jrue Holiday, and a lot of teenagers have one night like that and never have another one.

But understand what you are actually looking at when he pulls down a rebound.

The only reason that body is on an NBA floor is that somebody once needed what was inside it.

Thomas Fidone II is a tight end for the New York Giants, and in his free time he puts tattoos on people.

He does them on himself too.

People started passing his work around this week and the reaction was pretty much the same from everybody. It is not hobby good. It is actually says about that part.

"It hurts doing it to yourself."

And here is what the work taught him.

"You don't want to rush things."

Hold onto that second one, because patience is the entire story with this guy.

He came out of Lewis Central High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa, as a four star recruit. He was rated the number 2 tight end in the whole country in the class of 2021 and the 92nd best player at any position.

Iowa wanted him. So did LSU and Michigan. He picked Nebraska.

Then he played one game as a freshman and tore his ACL.

He rehabbed it for a year, got back on a field, and tore the same knee again.

Two ACLs. Same knee. A little over a year apart.

He missed the entire 2022 season and almost all of the one before it. Six foot five, 243 pounds, and for two straight years he was a guy in a brace standing on a sideline in street clothes.

Here is what he says now about losing that time.

He would not undo it. He says those injuries are the reason he is who he is, mentally and physically. He credits his family and his friends for getting him through the rehab, and he credits his coach at the time, Matt Rhule, for giving him a foundation.

He finally got back out there in 2023 and caught 25 passes for 260 yards and four touchdowns. In 2024 he put up 91 yards against Indiana, the best game of his college career.

Sports Illustrated sat him down and got all of that out of him in May, the needle and the knee both, and it is worth reading.

Then the 2025 draft came, and the kid who had been the second best tight end recruit in America four years earlier sat through six rounds.

The Giants took him 219th overall. Two hundred and eighteen players went in front of him.

Be straight about it. He is a seventh round tight end who landed on injured reserve last November with a foot problem, and when he showed up in New York there were four tight ends on the depth chart in front of him. Guys with that résumé usually wash out in two or three years and nobody remembers them.

And a tattoo business on the side does not block anybody or catch anything.

But go back to what he actually said about the needle.

He said you do not want to rush things.

He learned that twice, on the same knee, before he turned 21 years old.

One year ago, against this same team, he went down with a torn ACL and his season was over.

Tonight he caught the first touchdown of the game, and Green Bay won it.

Tucker Kraft is a tight end for the Green Bay Packers, and he is from Timber Lake, South Dakota.

Timber Lake has ts on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation, and in 2024 they made him an honorary member of the tribe.

He lost his father Doug in 2013. He was 12 years old. He has two brothers, Cody and Tanner. His mother was seriously ill with an autoimmune disease around the same stretch.

Here is how he puts it.

He says he came from adversity, and that he figured out early he was going to have to make his own way.

At Timber Lake High School he played running back, middle linebacker and punter, because that is what you do at a school that size. As a senior he ran for 1,405 yards and 24 touchdowns and made first team All-State.

Then he went to South Dakota State, redshirted, and turned into a consensus All-American. He caught 65 passes for 780 yards there as a redshirt sophomore and made first team all conference twice. In 2022 that team won the national championship.

Power Four schools came after him with six figure offers to transfer out. He stayed in Brookings.

Green Bay took him in the third round, 78th overall, in 2023. About 100 people from Timber Lake watched that draft with him back home.

He played all 17 games as a rookie and scored his first NFL touchdown against Detroit. The next year he caught 50 passes for 707 yards and seven touchdowns, and tore a pectoral muscle in the spring on top of it.

Now here is the stretch that makes tonight land.

In Week 8 of last season he went for 143 yards and two touchdowns against Pittsburgh. That was the best game he had ever played.

Week 9 was Carolina. He came down wrong, the MRI said torn ACL, and that was his year.

In September the Packers gave him four years and 75 million dollars with 26 and a half million guaranteed up front. He got married in 2024. His daughter Charlotte was born a few months before the knee.

Be straight about it. A 12 yard touchdown is not a season. He is 25 and he has already torn a pectoral muscle and an ACL in three years, and tight ends who get hurt like that tend to keep getting hurt.

But think about the schedule for a second.

The last time he saw Carolina, he got carried off and did not play again.

He saw them again tonight and put the first points of the night on the board.

He caught a 53 yard pass in the second quarter and did not get up.

He made it to the medical tent on his own. Then he left the field entirely, got into an ambulance, and went to a hospital with a chest injury.

Then he came back. In the ambulance. In the third quarter.

He got his shoulder pads, which tells you what he had already decided in there.

And he went back into the game.

Christian Watson plays receiver for the Green Bay Packers, and that is what happened to him tonight against Carolina.

The collision that did it took out both of them. Panthers cornerback Will Lee needed a cart to get off the field on the same play.

Here is the part that makes it more than a scary clip.

Watson tore his ACL at the end of the 2024 season and spent a year getting back. This is his first full season since.

It is also the best one he has ever had. Through eight games he has 44 catches for 695 yards and 6 touchdowns, and the yardage is already a career high with nine games still to play.

Be straight about it. Nobody outside that medical staff knows what they checked for or what they ruled out. A chest injury serious enough to put a man in an ambulance is not a small thing, and a player going back in the same night is going to get second guessed by a lot of people.

It probably should be.

But he tore a knee apart last year and spent twelve months getting back on a field.

Tonight he left that field in an ambulance and came back in the same one to play some more.

Same stubbornness. Only one of them is obviously a good idea.