Jaleel McLaughlin ran 28 yards into the end zone tonight as the Cleveland Browns beat the Pittsburgh Steelers 27-24. His mother Tonya lost her factory job when he was 12. The Ford Focus is where they ended up. His grandmother had already died of a heart attack while the family was living in her house. They stayed in motels before that. They stayed with relatives. Tonya was raising him and his siblings by herself, and then she had to take work in Arkansas and was apart from her sons for two years. They got back together right as he started high school. He was good. At Forest Hills High School in Marshville, North Carolina he won a state title in basketball, two more in track, and averaged 8.4 yards a carry as a senior running back. Almost nobody offered him a scholarship. He is 5 foot 7. The few schools that called mostly wanted to move him to defensive back. Notre Dame College took him. Division II. South Euclid, Ohio, ten miles east of Cleveland. He ran for 302 yards in his first college game. A Division II record. Then 2,421 yards as a freshman. Then 2,316 yards and 33 touchdowns as a sophomore. He transferred to Youngstown State and kept going. He finished with 8,166 yards and 79 touchdowns. Read that again. Nobody in the history of college football, in any division, has ever run for more yards than Jaleel McLaughlin. He went undrafted in 2023. The Denver Broncos signed him off the street. He played all 17 games as a rookie. Here is the part that gets me. Notre Dame College, where he set those records, closed its doors for good on May 2, 2024. The school does not exist anymore. There is no team to go back to. On September 1 of this year the Cleveland Browns put him on their practice squad. On September 15 they moved him up to the active roster after Dylan Sampson got hurt. Tonight, ten miles from a campus that is gone, in a three point game against the team Cleveland hates most, he took it 28 yards and scored. "Have a goal, have a dream," he said when he broke the record. "Don't let nobody tell you what you can be, no matter the circumstance, no matter how small, no matter where you come from." Be honest about where he stands. He is a backup. He went from Denver to a practice squad to a roster spot that only opened because somebody else got injured. Next September is not promised to him either. But he has already done the hardest thing he will ever do, and it had nothing to do with football. A kid who slept in a Ford Focus is playing on Thursday night in prime time.

On Sunday an undrafted rookie quarterback will make his first NFL start for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It took him six years of college football to get there. Jalon Daniels came out of Lawndale High School in California with two Power Five offers. Kansas and Syracuse. He had been committed to Middle Tennessee State before that. He picked Kansas, and as a freshman in 2020 he started six games and lost all six. In 2021 he beat Texas in Austin. Kansas had not won a game in that stadium since 1938. In 2022 he was second team All Big 12, and in the Liberty Bowl he threw for 544 yards and accounted for six touchdowns. He is the first player in the history of the sport to throw for 500 yards and five touchdowns and run for one in the same game. Then it stopped. He went into 2023 as the Big 12 Preseason Player of the Year and played three games before a back injury took the season. Most guys leave at that point. He had already been there four years. He came back for 2024. Then he came back again for 2025. Six seasons in one place. Here is what he did with the extra time nobody wanted him to need. He graduated in December 2024 with a 3.58 GPA and a degree in sport management. He was named Big 12 Scholar Athlete of the Year, the first in Kansas history. He made Academic All Big 12 five times. He was voted team captain four times, which no Kansas player had ever done. And in his sixth season, with the money he was finally allowed to earn, he started a foundation. He named it MOM2JD6. The 6 is his jersey number. The MOM is his mother. Kansas describes what it does in plain language. It supports single mothers raising athletic children, through mentorship, training, financial aid and community resources. Then he enrolled in graduate school in public and nonprofit management, so he would actually know how to run it. In his last year of college he won the Pop Warner College Football Award, was a finalist for the William V. Campbell Trophy and a semifinalist for the Jason Witten Collegiate Man of the Year. In April, every team in the NFL passed on him. All seven rounds. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers signed him as an undrafted free agent on May 8. Now the honest part. Undrafted quarterbacks almost never last, Tampa Bay is turning to him because they have to, and one start proves nothing about whether he can play. But a kid who nobody but Kansas and Syracuse wanted stayed six years, got hurt twice, graduated with honors, and spent his first real paycheck building something for mothers like his own. On Sunday he runs out with the first team.