An NFL rookie walked into a stadium today with four names stitched on his jacket. They were a Black Hawk crew that went down last September. One of them was the son of a man whose restaurants play the national anthem every day at noon. The rookie is Landon Robinson, a defensive tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals, a Naval Academy graduate and a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. The jacket has four patches on it. Every one of them says C Company, 4th Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The Night Stalkers. The unit that flies special operations missions in the dark. That company calls itself the Chupacabras, and the regiment's motto is stitched on every patch. Night Stalkers Don't Quit. Under each patch is a name. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Andrew Kraus, 39, of Sanibel, Florida. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Andrew Cully, 35, of Sparta, Missouri. Sergeant Donavon Scott, 25, of Tacoma, Washington. Sergeant Jadalyn Good, 23, of Mount Vernon, Washington. On the night of September 17, 2025, their MH-60 Black Hawk went down near Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. None of the four survived. Now here is why a Navy man put an Army patch on his coat. In 2011 a marketing executive at Under Armour named Bill Kraus and a restaurant man named Steve Newton opened a barbecue place in Glen Burnie, Maryland. They picked the opening date deliberately. September 11, 2011. Ten years to the day. Mission BBQ is in 23 states now. Every location plays the national anthem every day at noon. On Veterans Day and on September 11 they feed military and first responders for free. The company became a significant supporter of Naval Academy athletics. Bill Kraus has sons. Alex went to the Naval Academy and became a Marine pilot. Andrew flew for the Night Stalkers. Three months after that crash, Army played Navy in Baltimore for the 126th time. Navy players wear unit patches in that game, more than 100 of them, picked because a player has family in a unit or because an alum wrote in and asked. Navy's defensive coordinator P.J. Volker called it "a way to respect and honor a lot of people." Navy's captain and starting nose tackle picked the Chupacabras. That was Landon Robinson. Today he wore the same four names into an NFL stadium. Be honest about the limits. It is a jacket, and patches do not bring anybody home. Robinson never served alongside those four. But Bill Kraus opened a restaurant on the tenth anniversary of September 11 so that every day, at noon, in every room he owns, somebody would stop and play the anthem for people who serve. Then the thing he spent 14 years honoring took his son. And a kid from his school keeps saying the names out loud. Kraus. Cully. Scott. Good.

In 1976, Joe Roth was the preseason favorite to win the Heisman Trophy. He grew up in El Cajon and ended up at Grossmont College, a junior college outside San Diego, where he led them to an undefeated season and a state championship. Cal took him in 1975. He took over at quarterback midway through that season and led the Golden Bears to a share of the Pac-8 title. Then came his senior year. Partway through it, he found out he was dying. Melanoma. It traced back to a mole that had been removed years earlier, and by the time they caught it, it was terminal. He told nobody. Not his teammates. Not the press. He finished the season, made first team All-American, and finished ninth in the Heisman voting while carrying that around by himself every Saturday. He only told people after the last game. And then he played two more. He had committed to the Hula Bowl and the Japan Bowl before the diagnosis, so he went to both. There is a story out of Japan his coach repeated for the rest of his life. After the game, Roth stood and signed autographs for children until every last kid in the line had one. Then he walked out of the building and threw up. His own words about what was happening to him. "Dying is not so tough. I'm lucky to be here as long as I was." A teammate remembered him calming a huddle with a line that reads completely differently once you know what he knew. "Everyone, relax. It's just a football play." Joe Roth died on February 19, 1977, in his apartment in Berkeley, surrounded by family and friends. He had turned down an amputation that might have bought him time. He was 21 years old. Cal retired his number 12. Forty nine years later it is still the only number the program has ever retired. They started a memorial game in his name that year and they still play it. There is a scholarship. There is an award given to the player who best shows courage, attitude and sportsmanship. The Japan Bowl named its MVP award after him. Berkeley gave him its highest honor even though he never got to graduate. This season Cal brought his uniforms back. The blue and gold from 1976, worn by kids who were not alive when he played. They also put out the first Joe Roth Collection. Three shirts. One of them has his face on it. Per SFGate, none of that money goes to melanoma research. None of it goes to the scholarship fund with his name on it. It goes to the athletic department. His brother Tom is 82. He says the school contacted him in July and he has not heard from them since. What he asked for was not complicated. "Support melanoma research, or drop it into the fund, and tell people what you've done." Cal says it is working on reconnecting with him. Fine. They can sort out the shirts. None of it touches the actual thing. A 21 year old found out he was going to die, decided his team did not need to carry it, and played out the season anyway. Then he stood in a room in Japan and signed for every kid in line while his body was failing. The number is retired. The game still gets played. Somebody wins that award every single year. They are still wearing his jersey, and no t-shirt was ever going to be the reason anybody remembered him.

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.

Boston College and Rutgers were always scheduled to play this season. Boston College moved the game to Friday night on purpose. September 11, 2026. Twenty five years. Rutgers is the FBS program closest to New York City. Thirty seven of their alumni were killed that day, including a football letterwinner named James Martello. So every helmet Friday night will carry the number 37, along with the names of the people it stands for. Never Forget runs down the sides of the jersey. The striping is a tribute to first responders. Players who wear the gloves can lock their hands together and the gloves read Never Forget too. Nothing on that uniform is a design choice. Boston College honors one man. Welles Crowther was a BC graduate working as an equities trader in the South Tower. He was also a volunteer firefighter back home in Rockland County, New York. When the building was hit, he went down to the 78th floor sky lobby, where dozens of people were trapped and badly hurt, and started getting them out. He carried a woman on his back down seventeen flights of stairs. Then he went back up. He did that over and over. He is credited with saving 18 people. The survivors who got out couldn't tell anybody who he was. They didn't know his name. All they could describe was that the man leading them down had a red bandanna tied over his mouth and nose to keep the smoke out. That's how the world came to know him. The man in the red bandanna. He didn't make it out. Since 2014, Boston College has played one Red Bandanna Game every season. The bandanna pattern runs through the numbers, the sleeves and the trim. Where a player's last name normally goes, the jersey reads For Welles. Friday night is that game. So on the 25th anniversary, in Chestnut Hill, one team runs out carrying 37 names on their helmets. The other runs out wearing a dead man's bandanna.

When Old Dominion opens its season Saturday night against Norfolk State, not one player will have his own name on his jersey. Every single one will read LTC SHAH. Lieutenant Colonel Brandon A. Shah was 42 years old. He grew up in Staunton, Virginia, enlisted in the Army in 2003 as an aviation operations specialist, then enrolled at Old Dominion and commissioned as an officer in 2007 with a degree in sociology. He flew AH-64 Apache helicopters. More than 1,200 flight hours across three aircraft, over 600 of them in combat. Iraq. Afghanistan. Eastern Europe. Bronze Star. Air Medal with Valor. Combat Action Badge. Senior Army Aviator Badge. In 2022 he came back to the campus where it started, to run the ROTC program and chair the Military Science Department. On the morning of March 12, a gunman walked into his classroom in Constant Hall. Shah did not take cover. "Brandon did not hesitate or take cover," Army Chaplain Lt. Col. Erik Alfsen said at his memorial. "Instead, he ran forward. He moved toward the threat. He exposed himself to danger, and he closed with the assailant, taking hold of him and bringing him to the ground." That gave his cadets the seconds they needed. They subdued the attacker. The FBI later credited those students with preventing further loss of life. Shah was shot in the struggle and died. Two others were wounded. He left behind his wife Kathrine and his children. "I truly believe Brandon knew exactly what he was doing in those final moments," Kathrine said. "He was protecting people. He was protecting his kids." Alfsen put it another way at the memorial. "There are cadets sitting before you on this field who will hug their families and kiss their loved ones goodnight tonight, because of Brandon's actions." Now here's the part that ties it all together. That memorial was held at S.B. Ballard Stadium. The football stadium. The same field the Monarchs will run onto Saturday night. It included a 21-gun salute and the firing of ODU's cannon. That cannon was Shah's. He took pride in painting it ODU blue, and he spent real effort working to make it as loud as he could get it. One of his colleagues said it plainly that day. "From now on, every time you hear big blue roar across the Elizabeth River, you can thank Lt. Col. Shah." So on Saturday, at 6 PM, in the stadium where they said goodbye to him, ODU will kick off in Under Armour camo with his name on 100 backs, and that cannon will go off after every score. The game-worn uniforms will be sold during the game for $300 each. Every dollar goes to his family. Shah once described what the Army had given him. "I've lived on four continents, been on five. I love flying and being around people who like to work." A kid from Staunton who enlisted at 20, came home to teach, and ran toward the thing everyone else was running from.