Coach Lex

Tonight Jalon Daniels won his first game as an NFL quarterback. He was on the Prime Video set afterward when he stopped talking and waved somebody over. "Ma, come here. Ma, come here." Her name is Star. Jalon Daniels' father made it clear he was not going to be part of their lives. Here is what his mother decided to do about that. "I wanted to make sure that he never felt that feeling of not having Dad there." So she worked full time for an insurance company and took a second seasonal job at Toys R Us. She drove him to Pop Warner practices. She would not let him sleep over at friends' houses until high school, though he could bring ten of them to hers anytime. And when he wanted to go to a party, there was a condition. She parked outside of it. "She let me know when it was time to leave," he says, laughing. "An hour and a half before the party ended, we were on our way home." Here is the other thing she told him, over and over. She wanted him to grow up to be the kind of man anybody's daughter could bring home to her mother. Now the football, which nobody handed him either. His sophomore year at Narbonne High School in Los Angeles, the coaches moved him back down to the freshman team. He transferred to Lawndale High School, won the job, and Lawndale went 14 and 2 and took the first state championship in school history. His first scholarship offer came from Tennessee-Martin. He committed to Middle Tennessee State. Then Kansas came to see him in December of his senior year, and he flipped. He gave the Kansas Jayhawks six seasons. In 2021 he beat Texas in Austin, where Kansas had not won a game since 1938. In 2022 he threw for 544 yards in the Liberty Bowl. Then a back injury took 2023 away, and most players leave at that point. He stayed. He graduated with a 3.58 GPA. He was voted team captain four times, which no Kansas player had ever done. And with the first real money he was ever allowed to earn, he started a foundation for single mothers raising athletic children. He named it after her. In April, all 32 teams passed on him for seven rounds. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers signed him as an undrafted free agent on May 8. Tonight was his second career start. He went 19 of 25 for 189 yards and threw a touchdown to Bucky Irving. The Buccaneers beat the Dallas Cowboys 24 to 16 for their first win of the season after losing their first four. One win does not make anybody an NFL quarterback, and he would tell you that himself. But when the cameras finally found him, the first thing he did was make sure they found her too. "No matter what, I was present, and he always knew I was present."