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.

Seattle drafted Vinnie Johnson seventh overall in 1979 out of Baylor, where he'd averaged 24 points a game and once dropped 50 on TCU. Two years later the Sonics traded him to Detroit, and he spent the next decade doing the same job every night. Coming off the bench. Thirteen NBA seasons and he was never the guy. He was the guy who came in when the guy needed a rest. He was spectacular at it. In the 1985 playoffs he scored 22 points in the fourth quarter against Boston. Danny Ainge came out of that game and gave him the name that stuck forever. "If that guy in Chicago is the Refrigerator, then Vinnie Johnson is the Microwave." In Game 5 of the 1990 Finals he hit a 14-footer with 0.7 seconds left to beat Portland and clinch Detroit's second straight championship. After that they called him 007 too. Two rings. 11,825 career points. Number 15 hanging in the rafters in Detroit. Total career earnings: about $6 million. His best season paid him $1.4 million, at the very end, in 1990. He retired in 1992. Three years later he started a company in Detroit that made packaging supplies for automakers. Here's what he said the point of it was. "I really wanted to get into business and create some jobs and opportunities. I wanted to do something different outside of basketball, but the main thing was giving back to the city of Detroit for all the support they have given me." General Motors gave him his break. He shifted the company from packaging into automotive assembly, which meant building whole systems for car manufacturers instead of shipping them parts in boxes. Then he just kept going. Piston Group today does more than $3 billion in annual revenue. It employs over 10,000 people across the United States, Mexico and Canada, in about three and a half million square feet of plant space. It supplies Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota and Chrysler. It is one of the largest minority-owned businesses in the world. Vinnie Johnson is worth somewhere around half a billion dollars. He made $6 million in thirteen years of professional basketball. His company now generates roughly 500 times that, every single year. And he built it in the city that watched him play, specifically so people there would have somewhere to work.

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.