Joel Love

Baylor football is wearing a six-year-old's artwork on their helmets today. Her name is ILaria Ramirez. She is from Cameron, Texas. She is a patient at Baylor Scott & White McLane Children's Medical Center. Here is how it happened. Baylor players went over to the children's hospital and sat down with the pediatric patients. Not a photo op, not a walk through and wave. They actually sat down at tables with the kids and drew together. Blank Baylor Bear heads. Markers. Make it yours. ILaria made hers pink and teal. She put a bear right in the middle of it. And then she did two things that nobody told her to do. She gave it a name. She called it the Helmet of Hope. And she picked three words to go around the edge of it. FAITH. VICTORY. STRENGTH. A six-year-old chose those. Not a marketing department. Not a coach. Not her parents. Her. Baylor took her drawing, turned it into a decal, and put it on every single helmet for today's Gold Rush game against Louisiana Tech. Not a sticker on one guy's helmet. Not a patch on the sleeve. Every player on the field wearing a first grader's bear on the side of their head. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and gold is the color for it worldwide. Baylor asked the entire stadium to wear gold today. Head coach Dave Aranda on why: "ILaria is one of us, and so we represent her and want her and her family to know that we're fighting along with her." And linebacker Kyler Jordan, on what today actually is: "Way bigger than football." Here is the number that sits underneath all of this. Nearly 1 in 285 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer before they turn 20. One in 285. Before 20 years old. Which means in a stadium that holds 45,000 people, the math says a few hundred of them have already been through some version of what ILaria is going through right now. That is why the gold matters. That is why a helmet decal matters. Somewhere in that building today there is a kid who knows exactly what a hospital room looks like, watching a Division I football team run out of the tunnel wearing a drawing made by a girl who is six. FAITH. VICTORY. STRENGTH. She picked those words herself.