What happened with the Panthers? ‘Hunger Games’ culture, backstabbing and another fired coach

[Bozzie]

What a mess..this team my be the new bell weather for NFL suck for the next long while.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — David Tepper thought he’d nailed it this time.

After firing Matt Rhule in October 2022, the Carolina Panthers owner was determined to get his second head-coaching hire right. Tepper, the hedge-fund billionaire who bought the team in 2018, ran a more thorough search in looking for Rhule’s successor, focusing on coaches with offensive backgrounds after missing on what he called a “CEO coach” in Rhule.
After interviewing nine candidates, Tepper decided on Frank Reich, the former Indianapolis Colts coach and the starting quarterback for the first game in Panthers history. Tepper, with a net worth north of $20 billion, gave Reich a four-year deal and provided him the resources to hire an all-star staff that would help develop a rookie quarterback.

But halfway through Reich’s first season, Tepper already was contemplating another coaching change.

With No. 1 overall draft pick Bryce Young struggling and the Panthers owning the league’s worst record, Tepper warned Reich in early November he needed to see improvement on offense. Tepper had mortgaged the team’s future to move up to draft Young. The rookie’s development was stagnating under an avalanche of sacks and hits in the pocket.

After the Panthers scored just 10 points with Reich again calling the plays in back-to-back losses against Dallas and Tennessee, Tepper fired him Nov. 27. The Panthers were 1-10 under Reich, whose tenure was the NFL’s shortest in 45 years.
During a news conference the day after Reich’s firing, Tepper declined to elaborate on his decision, telling reporters they could “speculate as to that.”

The offensive problems and Young’s development doomed Reich. But there was a lot going on behind the scenes on Reich’s staff.

The Athletic spoke to more than 20 Panthers coaches, players and other league sources, some of whom were granted anonymity so they could speak freely. They painted a picture of dysfunction inside the Panthers’ offices, with assistant coaches undermining other coaches as many went into self-preservation mode when it became clear Reich’s days were numbered.

Team sources described a “Hunger Games” culture at Bank of America Stadium. Coaches said they believed other staff members were text messaging Tepper behind Reich’s back about issues they saw with the team. In one instance, general manager Scott Fitterer and an offensive coach went to Tepper with a coaching suggestion for the quarterback.

“People just finger-pointing hoping they don’t get exposed,” said one assistant.

Days before Thanksgiving, with the team spiraling and Young getting pummeled, Tepper told Reich to fix the rookie’s footwork. Fitterer and others had told Tepper that Young’s feet were the cause of some of the Panthers’ protection issues. They believed Young wasn’t dropping back deep enough on his pass sets.

Tepper has been criticized for micromanaging and getting hands-on with football decisions. Prior to the 2019 season, he persuaded then-head coach Ron Rivera to switch to a 3-4 defense — which Tepper was familiar with as a former Pittsburgh Steelers minority partner — and drove the team’s interest in Deshaun Watson before the quarterback was traded to Cleveland in 2022.

Tepper’s instruction about Young’s footwork came after weekly conversations between Tepper and Reich on Young’s development and early struggles.
League sources said Tepper struggled with the decision to fire Reich. But the combination of Young’s difficulty understanding Reich’s offense, specifically the reads, timing and ball placement, as well as Young’s lack of protection, convinced the owner the organization wasn’t helping its quarterback, but ruining him.
Reich’s firing came 10 months after he was named the first offensive-minded head coach in Panthers history. At Reich’s introductory news conference, Tepper boasted of Reich’s ability to build a top-10 staff that “should be an absolute standard.” With Tepper supplying the capital, Reich assembled one of the NFL’s largest staffs, stocked with a pair of former head coaches (Dom Capers and Jim Caldwell), two ascending coordinators (Thomas Brown and Ejiro Evero) and several other well-known assistants.

Tepper also encouraged Reich to go outside of his “circle” with some of the hires. As such, many of the offensive coaches had never worked together and brought different philosophies to an offense that would be led by a rookie quarterback from Week 1. Besides the disagreements in scheme, there were personality conflicts and factions formed on a staff that included two main holdovers from Rhule’s staff — offensive line coach James Campen and special teams coordinator Chris Tabor, both of whom were retained at Tepper’s urging.
After Tepper named Tabor interim coach last week, one of Tabor’s first moves was to fire quarterbacks coach Josh McCown and running backs coach Duce Staley, who was on Philadelphia’s staff with Reich in 2017 when the Eagles won the Super Bowl. Staley was still with the Eagles two years later when McCown played for the team.

The 44-year-old McCown logged 17 seasons in the NFL as a backup quarterback. McCown twice interviewed for the Houston Texans’ head-coaching vacancy, but his Panthers’ role was his first NFL coaching job.

Some in Carolina thought Reich and McCown weren’t tough enough on Young as the 2021 Heisman Trophy winner from Alabama got off to a bumpy start.

Reich, Fitterer and the offensive coaches decided the priority before Young’s first season was preparing him to call plays in the huddle for the first time and giving him time to absorb a playbook that blended Reich’s system with wide zone concepts Brown bought from the Los Angeles Rams. Any tweaks or changes the Panthers wanted to make to Young’s mechanics would wait until the offseason.
But Young has been taking a beating. He’s been sacked 44 times and is on pace to finish with 64, which would be the fourth-highest total in NFL history. Some in the organization believed inconsistent depth on his dropbacks was at least part of the issue for the 5-foot-10 quarterback.
After Tepper delivered the message to do something about it, McCown began working with Young on his footwork before the Panthers’ Week 12 game at Tennessee — three months into the season. Veteran backup quarterback Andy Dalton said Young’s dropbacks were among the teaching points during the Panthers’ Thanksgiving week practices.

“Footwork’s a part of playing this game. And it’s not changing his footwork,” Dalton said. “I think it’s just an emphasis on just keeping it consistent. I went through it, too. On certain throws, you want your footwork to look similar and all that kind of stuff. So I think it’s just more of an emphasis on that.”
One source said he didn’t notice much change in Young’s dropbacks against the Titans, who had four sacks and six hits on Young in a 17-10 loss that dropped the Panthers to a league-worst 1-10. As he left the visitors locker room in Nashville, a visibly irritated Tepper shook his head and yelled, “F—!”

Reich was gone by the next morning, fired after the NFL’s shortest head-coaching stint since 1978 — and for the second time in as many seasons. Reich went 40-33-1 in five seasons in Indianapolis before being let go in November 2022.

Reich, who turned 62 on Monday, would often use the phrase “diversity of thought” when describing his staff. But trying to incorporate Brown’s ideas into his system — featuring shotgun sets and a horizontal-stretch pass game — proved to be clunky.

“It’s just not a good offense,” one staffer said. “You didn’t see Indy’s offense when they (were second in) the league in rushing (in 2021). You didn’t see Philly when he was there or when he was with the Chargers and those dynamic offenses. You didn’t see any of that.”
But many in league circles — including talent evaluators with other teams — question whether Fitterer surrounded Young with enough playmakers after the GM sent No. 1 receiver DJ Moore to Chicago as part of the deal for the first pick. The Panthers are 13-33 since Fitterer arrived in 2021, a .283 winning percentage that is tied with the Bears for the worst mark over that span. Fitterer has been given no assurances about his future in Charlotte, according to a league source.
With the Panthers 0-6 at the bye, Reich turned play calling over to the 37-year-old Brown, who coached running backs and tight ends with the Rams but had never called plays. After the Panthers beat Houston 15-13 in the first game after the change, Reich gave Brown a game ball and later got choked up talking about the moment.

But the Houston win was followed by losses to Indianapolis and Chicago, both of which had losing records and were missing their starting quarterbacks. The Panthers managed just 13 points in both losses and failed to score an offensive touchdown against the Bears.
The heat was turning up on Reich, with The Athletic reporting after the game against the Bears that ownership needed to see more progress on offense. Reich was getting the message as well: On the Monday following the Week 10 loss at Chicago, Reich announced he would be calling plays again.

Reich’s reversal further divided the offensive staff, with one assistant saying, “That was shocking.”

After seeing Young play well in hurry-up mode at the end of a couple of lopsided losses early in the season, Reich wanted to use more no-huddle offense and thought he was better equipped than Brown to run it. In Reich’s first game back as play caller, a 33-10 loss to Dallas, the Panthers finished with a season-low 187 yards and Young was sacked seven times. In fairness, the Cowboys are top five in the league in yards and points allowed and rank seventh in sacks.

The wounds from Reich’s reversal on play calling haven’t healed yet. When asked last week about Reich’s impact on him, Brown called it a “loaded question” before adding he was fortunate for the opportunity Reich gave him.

The Panthers’ defensive assistants, nearly all of whom had worked with Evero previously, have been more aligned, according to sources.

But that has not been the case on the offensive side. At one point, several coaches wanted to bench Young in favor of Dalton, who had the Panthers’ only 300-yard passing game when Young missed the Week 3 game at Seattle with an ankle injury. But those conversations never reached Reich, Fitterer or ownership, according to high-ranking team sources.
Other coaches felt they couldn’t voice their opinions without being viewed as malcontents.

Several sources said Reich would call out Young for mistakes during team-wide film reviews — as he did other players — early in the season but backed off in recent weeks, with Young’s confidence in mind.

“You can coach a player hard,” said one staffer, “without killing his spirit.”

But one player said it wasn’t Reich’s nature or coaching style to be overly critical of any player or position group.

There also have been issues with scheme fits.

Brown’s background is with the Rams’ mid-zone and wide-zone runs, which weren’t a great match for some of the Panthers’ offensive linemen. Right guard Austin Corbett ran the scheme during three seasons in L.A., including the Rams’ Super Bowl season of 2021. But Corbett missed the first six games this year while recovering from ACL surgery, then injured his MCL in the same knee against Dallas in Week 11 and was lost for the season.

Center Bradley Bozeman conceded his more bruising skill set wasn’t ideal for the wide zone, best suited for quicker linemen who can occupy defensive linemen early in the play and then get to the second level.

“Running downhill is what I love to do,” Bozeman said. “That’s what I’ve made my money on. Unfortunately, we didn’t have many opportunities to do that.”

Reich experimented in training camp with putting Young under center, which Young did infrequently in college. Some concepts that might have helped negate an opponent’s pass rush, including play-action passes, are more effective when the quarterback is under center. But when the season started, Reich — Jim Kelly’s backup in the Bills’ K-Gun offenses during the 1990s — had Young lined up in pistol and shotgun sets almost exclusively.

With Brown back calling plays Sunday in a 21-18 loss at Tampa Bay, Young was under center for seven of the Panthers’ 13 first-quarter plays. But the familiar issues soon resurfaced; Young was sacked four times and threw an interception on his final pass to end any comeback hopes.
Reich’s efforts to boost Young’s confidence — some players viewed as overprotectiveness — continued through what turned out to be Reich’s final offensive play with the Panthers at Tennessee. Trailing by 7 and facing a fourth-and-6 at the two-minute warning, Young saw the Titans line up in what he believed to be Cover 0 — man coverage with no deep defender — and checked to a wide receiver screen to DJ Chark.

Chark caught the ball four yards behind the line of scrimmage and was tackled for no gain by safety Amani Hooker, allowing the Titans to reclaim possession and run out the clock. After the game, Reich said it was the right check by Young and that Chark might have gotten too far behind the line of scrimmage. A clearly agitated Chark insisted the Titans were not in Cover 0 and the Panthers should have stuck with the original play call.

A former NFL head coach agreed, saying the Titans fooled Young into thinking they were in Cover 0 before dropping their backside safety to the post area.

That the postgame spotlight fell on one of the receivers was not a new development. The group’s difficulties getting open has been a season-long narrative.

“I don’t think we got the brunt of coaches’ criticism. But I do feel like we do get a lot of the blame when it comes to the success of the offense,” Chark said last week. “Obviously, when you talk about offense, the first thing that we say (is), ‘You’ve gotta give Bryce weapons,’ and things like that.”

The offensive problems have persisted all season: The Panthers are averaging 15.9 points a game and haven’t topped the 20-point barrier since a 42-21 loss at Miami on Oct. 15.

Bozeman isn’t sure whether the problems stem from scheme or personnel. “The fact of it is we didn’t really score many points this season,” he said. “We never could execute and get it to that point.”

The Panthers need someone who can get Young untracked and playing closer to the level of Texans rookie C.J. Stroud, Young’s friend and former AAU basketball rival in southern California. Tepper again is expected to focus his search on coaches with offensive backgrounds, with Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson — who canceled his interview with the Panthers last year — viewed as a top target.
Johnson is a native of Asheville, N.C., who played at North Carolina. But it might not be easy to lure him to Charlotte: Some in the Panthers’ organization, according to a league source, have been texting Johnson about how complicated it’s been to work in Carolina this season.

While Tepper prepares to start another coaching search and Reich, Staley and McCown contemplate their next moves, the players and remaining coaches will try to avoid becoming the first 1-16 team since the NFL adopted a 17-game schedule.

“I can honestly say I don’t think (Reich) was the sole problem and everything is fixed now,” Chark said. “We’ve still got a lot of stuff we have to fix.”

 

[Bozzie]

The Jaguars’ $22 million question: How did four years of theft go undetected?​

How could this happen?

That question swept through the offices of NFL teams last week after The Athletic broke the news that Amit Patel, 31, a former employee in the finance department of the Jacksonville Jaguars, allegedly stole more than $22 million from the team over a four-year period.

Patel was a mid-level employee who worked for the Jaguars from 2018-23. He allegedly created fraudulent charges on the club’s virtual credit card and then covered his tracks by sending falsified files to the team’s accounting department. According to a charging document, he used that money to buy vehicles, a condominium and a designer watch worth over $95,000. He also purchased cryptocurrency, splurged on luxury travel for himself and others and used the funds to keep a criminal defense lawyer on retainer. Patel’s attorney said that the vast majority of the $22 million he stole were gambling losses; Patel allegedly placed bets on football and daily fantasy sports with online gambling sites.
Patel is expected to plead guilty to multiple charges — wire fraud and an illegal monetary transaction — in a court appearance Thursday, his attorney, Alex King, said.

In a statement, the Jaguars said that the franchise engaged “experienced law and accounting firms to conduct a comprehensive independent review, which concluded that no other team employees were involved in or aware of his criminal activity.” That fact makes the question people around the league were asking last week even more salient: How was Patel, working alone, able to steal more than twice the amount quarterback Trevor Lawrence counts against the Jaguars’ salary cap?

The Athletic spoke to two people familiar with Patel’s work for the Jaguars as well as nine people who work or have worked in finance for NFL teams or other pro sports franchises. Patel was no mastermind, people who knew him said, but rather a guy in the right place at the right time. The Jaguars may be a franchise worth an estimated $4 billion (according to Forbes), but the team’s finance department was understaffed. And turnover in key positions and a switch to a new credit card system created an opening that Patel exploited. The people who knew him and others who work or have worked for NFL teams questioned why Jacksonville didn’t have better safeguards in place that would have made it more difficult for Patel to get away with what he did and for so long.

“If you’re running a tight business, this would be impossible to pull off more than once,” said a former chief operating officer for an AFC team. “For (four) years, somebody was asleep at the switch.”
“I know people won’t believe it. But he was super basic.”
That was how one person who knew Patel during his time working for the Jaguars described him. That person and others who spoke to The Athletic were granted anonymity to discuss his work, which remains under federal investigation. Patel didn’t wear fancy clothes or flash his new expensive watch or brag about trips he took on private jets with friends. “Aside from the fact that he drove a Tesla, if you were to see Amit, you wouldn’t assume like, Oh, here’s a dude that is siphoning millions of dollars from his job,” the source said.
Patel was friendly and well-liked in the office. His job required him to interact with many department heads, and the source said he had “really great connections with everyone across the organization.” Patel oversaw the budget activity for each department, and he was responsible for helping department heads code individual expenses. If an expense came through on a corporate credit card, Patel was the person Jaguars employees would go to to ask: Hey, where does this need to go?

The staffing hierarchy for an NFL office is similar to any organization: coordinator, manager, director, vice president, senior vice president. Patel joined the Jaguars in 2018 as the coordinator of financial planning and analysis and was not promoted until three years later — to manager of financial planning and analysis. So the bulk of the alleged fraud occurred when he was a coordinator.
Court documents detail how Patel helped prepare the Jaguars’ monthly financial statements, oversaw department budgets and acted as the administrator of various programs, including the Jaguars virtual corporate card program. In October 2019, Patel’s direct supervisor, the director of financial planning and analysis, moved to a role in a different department and was not replaced. Two sources familiar with Patel’s work for the team said two other staffers also left the finance department, forcing others, including Patel, to pick up their work. It was not uncommon for staffers to arrive at work at 8 a.m. and not leave until 9 p.m.

“There was some transition in the organization which I believe created an opportunity for this to flourish,” said one source.

Added King, Patel’s attorney: “They were short-staffed in those departments. Normally you’d have segregation of duties, those kinds of internal checks and balances and they had lost people through attrition. … You’re supposed to have Person A do this part and Person B do this part as a check and balance and segregation of duties and all of a sudden he was doing both roles.”
The Jaguars switched to a virtual credit card system after Patel had been with the team for about a year. VCCs are considered more secure than having employees carry around physical cards, and they keep the card information private when making online transactions. However, it takes time for employees to transition to the new system, and the person introducing the system is relied upon to answer questions. He or she becomes the go-to, the trusted expert.

Patel was that trusted person in Jacksonville. When he first started managing the VCC program, there was an employee from accounting who checked Patel’s submitted sheets, but then that employee left, and that layer of security also went away.

“The number one rule you learn in accounting is you need to have dual controls for a reason,” said one source.

The federal charging documents state that as the sole administrator of the VCC program, Patel had the power to create user accounts, approve new VCCs, request changes to the available credit for the VCCs, and classify all VCC transactions in the Jaguars’ general ledger. Each month, he created an “integration file” that listed each VCC transaction with cost coding information. But instead of accurately reporting the VCC transactions, Patel is alleged to have created fraudulent entries using a variety of methods to ensure that the total dollar amount of VCC expenses matched the balances paid by the Jaguars. Charging documents state that he “identified legitimate recurring VCC transactions, such as catering, airfare and hotel charges, and then duplicated those transactions; he inflated the amounts of recurring VCC transactions; he entered completely fictitious transactions that might sound plausible, but that never actually occurred; and he moved legitimate VCC charges from upcoming months into the month of the integration file that was immediately due to the accounting department.”

People who might assume an NFL franchise would be a tightly monitored operation are not wrong. Still, in Jacksonville, that description only applied to the football side of the business, because the league office monitors each team for salary cap compliance.
“We were so anal about everything,” said a former Jacksonville employee on the football side. “It went down to the penny. Constant communication with internal accounting, constant communication with the NFL management council, with player personnel (in) NFL headquarters, so by the time an official audit (from the NFL) came down, it was yesterday’s news.”

Audits of the non-football side of the Jaguars did happen, according to a source, but they did not scrutinize every transaction. “The thing with any audit is everything is samples. So if they pull a sample and the support aligns and supports the transaction, then there are not that many questions.”

In 2019, the FBI caught Sacramento Kings chief revenue officer Jeff David stealing $13.4 million from five companies by representing to them that payments they made were going to the Kings, when instead they were going to bank accounts that only he controlled. David was sentenced to seven years in prison but was granted an early release in September 2023.

An ESPN article chronicling the mess in Sacramento described how it became a “cautionary tale” within NBA circles, with CFOs sharing different methods of internal stress tests at the league’s annual sales and marketing meeting. One NBA team president told ESPN the franchise “initiated a full audit of its operations” days after David’s fraud became public knowledge.

David was a top executive stealing from other companies, not a lower-level employee allegedly defrauding his own organization. But the reaction from the NBA community mirrors what is now happening across the NFL.

“We saw a mess out there with the Sacramento Kings, so it’s not the first time,” one current AFC team president said. “But you certainly step back and think, what do we have in place?”

According to interviews with officials from other NFL teams as well as individuals working in finance at other professional sports franchises, the Jaguars may be an outlier in how little they were doing to monitor an employee with so much control over spending. Most of those interviewed were gobsmacked that one person would have unchecked oversight of the VCC setup.

“Talk about having egg on your face. That’s a whole f—-ing omelet,” said a former finance specialist for an NHL team.

A former finance employee for an NFC team said that their CFO ran the corporate card program, accounts payable received the statements for the cards, and then a manager approved each report. That finance employee reviewed the court filing that detailed Patel’s alleged crimes and said the sheer number of falsified transactions he created should have resulted in detection at an earlier point.

“A lot of times a big number might not look like an outlier,” said a former chief administrative officer of an NFL team. “Usually, you have someone who charges a payment and then expenses it to someone else. Then the money comes back to the budget and you see the figure hitting your account as an outflow of cash. Someone would notice if they turned in a bill for $100,000 and it was paid out by someone else at $150,000.”
But if one person handles multiple layers of the process, it can go “upside-down” quickly. “It certainly was a flawed system they had in Jacksonville,” he said. “Somebody was given way too much leeway and way too much trust.”

A former NFL COO said in a text message that he had “never heard of an employee having that kind of access without layered controls in place. … Usually everybody up to and including CEO level has another party who has to approve expenses. Sometimes it might be at a certain level (say above $10k) but their situation sounds highly unusual.”

Another former NFL COO said that Patel’s alleged fraud would likely have been detected at his organization because his fraudulent charges would have blown the annual budget. “Once a fiscal year was underway, each department head would receive a monthly update of expenses for the month versus the plan. Sometimes the actual spending might vary from the planned spending for simple timing reasons. Anything over a 5 percent variance would receive scrutiny from a number of sources including the finance department, the person that budget reported to and/or myself,” he said in a text message.
The spreadsheet integration file Patel allegedly falsified might not have even been reviewed by superiors, said the former finance employee for an NFC team, but rather something that accounting merely uploaded to a server. “It’s accounts payable, so that’s not like a fine tooth comb. When it gets back to accounts payable, you’re under the assumption that it’s all taken care of, and it’s ready to be paid,” the employee said.

A third former COO explained that teams often undergo three different audits annually: a league audit focused on compliance with the salary cap, then two others, one done internally, then another initiated by a banking institution (if the team borrows money). The internal audit would have been the one most likely to detect Patel’s alleged fraud, the COO explained.

The finance people who spoke to The Athletic said they expected NFL teams to review their reporting structure and potentially beef up those internal audits in light of what happened in Jacksonville. The senior members of the Jaguars’ financial operations while Patel was there remain in their posts. According to the team’s website, the organization has increased the size of the finance department by six employees since Patel was fired in February. Two of those positions are new — a vice president of accounting, and a senior manager of accounting. The team added in a statement: “With the assistance of external experts, (the organization) has extensively reviewed its own policies and procedures, added staff to its finance department, and taken other measures to ensure the integrity of its financial controls.”

As for Patel, his attorney said Patel checked himself into an inpatient recovery center this past spring and has cooperated with the government and the Jaguars. King said his client is remorseful, takes “full responsibility for his actions” and has opened a gambling addiction recovery center, where he plans to be “active in the treatment community.”

He was also working for Uber, driving the black Tesla that is referenced in court documents as one of the spoils from his alleged crimes. (His attorney said Patel purchased the car with his own money.)

A few days before his alleged fraud became a national headline, Patel picked up Chris Chaney, a product marketer from Cincinnati, and his wife from the Jacksonville airport and drove them 40 minutes to their Airbnb in Jacksonville Beach. They were in town to see the Bengals play the Jaguars.

Chaney said Patel made small talk as he drove, pointing out the country club where he is a member and telling the couple he’d been a Jaguars fan since he moved to Jacksonville as a kid. Patel told Chaney he’d worked in finance for the team but was recently laid off because of some restructuring.

 

[Bozzie]

A little corn ball but an interesting read.​

​

Alcoholism, ayahuasca and the enlightenment of an NFL player​

LAUDERDALE-BY-THE-SEA, Fla. — The Buffalo Bills have a new safety this season.

He sometimes plays close to the line of scrimmage, even lining up in the gaps and banging helmets with interior linemen. They use him as a hybrid linebacker in a three-safety dime package. He has played free safety, strong safety, outside cornerback, inside cornerback, left linebacker and right linebacker. And more.
Physically and mentally, he is being challenged, but he’s grateful, content and all in.

The Bills’ new safety is Jordan Poyer. It’s the same Jordan Poyer who played for the team the previous six seasons, the only player in the NFL to have 500 or more tackles, 20 or more interceptions and 10 or more sacks in that time frame, a Bills captain for the fourth time, an Ed Block Courage Award winner in 2017, a Pro Bowl safety last year and an All-Pro the year before.

But this is a new Jordan Poyer because of ayahuasca.

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In the spring of 2020, NFL team facilities were closed because of COVID-19, so Bills defenders met in Washington, D.C., for a few days to train, study and bond.
The first evening, cornerback Josh Norman welcomed the players to his home, and out came the shots of tequila. When Poyer was handed a shot, he looked at it and then at his teammates.

He put it down.

Norman and the others, who had never seen him turn down a drink, were taken aback.

“What?” one said. “Come on, Deejay Poyo!”

Deejay Poyo was Poyer’s alter ego. Inspired by tequila and a turntable, Poyer became someone else. And for Poyer, there was value in being someone else.

What his teammates didn’t know was that Poyer had not put alcohol to his lips in about three months, since he downed a shot of tequila on March 13 in the Puerto Vallarta airport bar during a 12-hour flight delay.

Poyer spent his childhood in Astoria, Ore., a picturesque town on the mouth of the Columbia River not far from the Pacific Ocean. His mother and stepfather worked at a juvenile detention center and raised him with a strict hand. When he was no longer under their watch, unsupervised as a freshman at Oregon State, Poyer drank. And drank and drank.

It never seemed to affect his play in college, where he was a consensus All-American. And despite his continued drinking, he made steady progress in his early NFL years.

In his third season, when he was an emerging starter with the Cleveland Browns, he DM’d an Instagram model after she liked one of his posts on Twitter. She was a freshman at Florida Atlantic, a small-town girl from the Adirondacks who knew nothing about football but thought Poyer was cute. He traveled to Florida to meet her, and before the weekend was over, Poyer declared, “I’m going to marry this girl.”
Poyer made numerous trips to Florida that offseason. That spring as Rachel Bush was finishing her freshman year of college, she learned she was pregnant. After their daughter, Aliyah, was born, Poyer signed with the Bills, and the family moved to Buffalo. He and Rachel married in 2018.

His drinking was out of control by then. He would down a six-pack of IPAs in 20 to 30 minutes for a quick buzz. Blacking out was a regular occurrence. His behavior tested his marriage, but there was a draw between him and Rachel like a north pole to south.

After the Bills lost to the Houston Texans in the wild-card round of the 2019 playoffs, Poyer was crestfallen. He says he drank heavily every day for five weeks. At one point Rachel rid their home of all alcohol, but he would still sneak what he could.

“I’d find him drinking in crazy places, like under the bathroom cabinets, hidden like a child,” Rachel says.

He was close to losing her.
The drinking, he realized, was an attempt to relieve stress — stress from football expectations and stress from family life. He was a worrier, except with a drink in his hand.

Poyer went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Then another, and another.

The get-together at Norman’s house was his first significant temptation.

“When I put that drink down for the first time, it was almost like I overcame a demon,” Poyer says.

The more time that passed, the less Poyer wanted to drink. He has no desire for it now, and the smell of alcohol almost makes him gag.
Being sober didn’t make him immune to anxiety and depression, however. In the 2022 season, he missed five games with elbow, foot, knee and rib injuries. When the Bills lost to the Bengals in the divisional playoff round, Poyer felt responsible for not doing more.

And his angst ran deeper than football.

“I still felt like there was something missing because I have this beautiful house, a beautiful family, everything anyone could ask for,” he says. “I still felt a sense of unhappiness, a sense of not understanding who I was, and why I was the way I was. A part of me felt guilty just because I was living this way.”
Poyer couldn’t come to terms with why, despite all his shortcomings, he was in such an enviable position. His football journey was improbable. No major college wanted him until Oregon State came in with a late offer to grayshirt, meaning his scholarship wouldn’t begin until January of his freshman year. He was chosen in the seventh round of the 2013 NFL draft, came into the league as a cornerback, was cut six games into his rookie season and then had to learn a new position with a new team. He took a blind-side hit that put him in the hospital for two days with a lacerated kidney and a concussion. His career could have been over then.

Yet by now he has outlasted 191 of the 217 players drafted ahead of him. And he hasn’t just survived in the NFL — he has thrived.

What had he done to deserve this?

Was he justifying his good fortune?

Would there be a greater purpose?
In 2018, Poyer saw a therapist for anxiety once a week. It was unfulfilling.

The answers were somewhere else.

In the Quechua language, ayahuasca (pronounced ‘eye-ah-WAH-ska’) means “vine of the soul.”

Ayahuasca is a psychedelic drug made from the leaves of the Psychotria viridis shrub and the stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine. It has been used for more than a thousand years by Amazonian tribes. Ingesting it can induce a dreamlike feeling, an altered state of consciousness, mystical experiences and euphoria.

In the summer of 2022, Aaron Rodgers revealed he had taken ayahuasca and credited it with helping him have two of the best seasons of his career for the Packers.

Poyer had never heard of ayahuasca at the time. “My first thought was eff that,” Poyer says. “You crazy? I’m not doing that.”

The funny word kept showing up in different conversations on his social media feeds and podcasts. Poyer researched it and became intrigued.
After the difficult 2022 season, Rachel suggested Poyer take a “guys trip” after the season to check out. But “guys trips” usually involve alcohol, and he didn’t want that. Sightseeing isn’t his thing. “What I really wanted to do was work on trying to be a better me,” he says.

He discovered Resonance, a retreat center in Costa Rica on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific coast and the cloud forest of Monteverde.

To prepare his mind to enter a state of awareness, he was to eat only chicken, fish and salad for one month, with no oils and sugar added. Then he had to cut out chicken and fish for the week preceding the ceremony. He also was told to practice yoga and breathing exercises that would be useful if he experienced anxiety during the three ceremonies spread over a week.

In a tiki hut in a wooded, secluded area, a shaman presented each participant with a cup of ayahuasca brew, which is kind of like tea, but with benefits. Taste is not one of them. Poyer says ayahuasca tastes like earth.

“It’s brownish and really thick,” he says. “It almost looks like oil, but it’s darker and thicker. It’s one of the worst things you could ever taste.”

For the first hour after swigging it down, he lay in a bean bag chair in silence, setting intentions. Poyer’s intentions were to understand himself better and love better. Eventually, the shaman provided a second cup, and then, enchantment.

“At first what it felt like was my soul left my body for a good two minutes,” Poyer says.

Initially, it was unsettling.

“People try to control it, but you can’t,” Poyer says. “It took me about five or 10 minutes to figure it out. The ego has to die so the medicine can work. In order to let go and let the medicine do what it’s supposed to do, we have to just breathe.”

For about the next hour, Poyer says the highest version of himself lectured him out loud. It was, in his word, “crazy.” First, highest-version Poyer addressed his desire to understand himself better.
“He was basically saying, ‘Jordan, look at your life, bro — what are you mad at?’ ” Poyer says. “It was what I needed to hear because I wasn’t appreciating anything — not my wife, my daughter, my family, my house. It was all about me and what I wanted.”

Then he turned to loving better. It was, he says, as if a Pandora’s box opened on how to love.

The remainder of the ceremonies, which lasted nine hours each, were about curiosity, energy and connectedness.

“It’s about how to be a good human,” he says. “And it grounds you. Really grounds you.”
Two days before OTAs began last April, Poyer returned to the Bills’ headquarters and stepped on the scale. The needle settled at 179 pounds, about 20 pounds below his playing weight.

After resuming his regular routine, the weight came back quickly.

He discussed his experience with curious teammates, coaches and the team psychologist. Poyer hoped ayahuasca would elevate his football performances as Rodgers believes it did his, but it hasn’t worked that way for him.

He is the second-leading tackler on his team but hasn’t made as many big plays as he would like. What he has done, according to former Bills defensive coordinator Les Frazier, now an analyst for NFL Network, is enable his defense to be the best it can by lifting others through versatility, sacrifice, toughness and communication. Poyer wears his “C” well.
“I feel like I’m playing OK this year,” Poyer said during the Bills’ bye week on the patio of his Florida home. “I’m not playing the best that I’ve played in my career. There are probably two plays I really want back. But I’m doing a lot. And in a very deep sense, I absolutely love that I’m entrusted with doing as much as I’m doing on this defense.”

Ayahuasca gifted him in another way — with perspective.

Ego is a powerful force in professional athletes. It helps them ascend and often hastens their downfalls. In previous seasons, Poyer believes his responses to successes and failures were too ego-driven. Football was him — he has an NFL logo tattooed on his left shoulder — and he was football.
Not anymore.

“We still have games left that I’m excited about, but I knew some way, somehow, this universe was going to test me this year,” he says. “We lost DaQuan Jones, Matt Milano and Tre’Davious White for the season. It’s hard. This s— is hard. And it’s not just (the losses). I’m 32, not this young spring chicken anymore. You know, s— hurts all the time. But my perspective is I get to play a game that I love, and I’m healthy enough to play. Every time you come out of a game, that’s a win in its own way.”
Poyer’s commitment is such that last season, when a rib injury precluded him from airplane travel, he took a 32-hour round-trip drive to play in a game in Kansas City. He wants to lift a Lombardi Trophy badly, as much as ever. But if it doesn’t happen, he believes he can handle the disappointment better.

On Fridays this season, Poyer, fellow safety Taylor Rapp and assistant strength coach Will Greenberg play crystal bowls at Bills headquarters. “The different tones that you can tune into can enhance chakras within you and help you heal,” he says.

Healing takes many forms.

When Poyer was 12, Louis Dunbar, who has done multiple stints in prison for violent crimes, called him for the first time and stunned him with the revelation he was his biological father. In subsequent conversations, Dunbar often said he wanted to see him or come to one of his games. He never has.
“I always had this hate and resentment toward him I was holding,” says Poyer, who doesn’t know where Dunbar is. “This experience enabled me to let that go. I realize I wouldn’t have anything — my daughter and my wife — if not for him. Even if it was just the seed he gave my mom. So someday I’ll meet him, give him a hug and tell him I’m sorry.”

Rachel has no interest in taking ayahuasca. But she is grateful her husband discovered it. “After he did ayahuasca, he became like my dream husband,” Rachel says. “I was nervous about what it would do to him, but he came back a totally new man, so appreciative of me and our family.”
Highest-version Poyer made Poyer aware he was not doing the little things — waking up with a smile, giving Rachel a hug on his way out, or being present even when his attention could be divided.

Poyer has turned off his DMs on Instagram and deleted his Twitter/X account. Instagram features a For You page — a personalized feed based on user engagement patterns. In the past, Poyer’s was filled with posts of other girls, according to Rachel. Now there’s nothing on Poyer’s For You page except football and ayahuasca. She knows because they have one another’s passwords.

“His attention now is 100 percent on me, his family and his career,” says Rachel, who has more than 4 million Instagram followers, an OnlyFans page and a line of skincare products.

Some players feel more pressure when the end is closer than the beginning. The Bills have an out in Poyer’s contract after this season. He isn’t stressing about any of it. His focus is here and now.
Poyer has thought about becoming a football commentator after retirement. But he has more to offer than sports talk. He could talk about why he’s never had a vaccine, why Aliyah is homeschooled, or how he believes God transcends religions.

He could discuss why he has always thought he might be an alien. “I truly feel like I’m not from this planet, always being the odd one out, having different perspectives, thinking differently,” says Poyer, who is fascinated by stars.

Poyer has what philosophers call epistemic humility — he believes knowledge is limited and filtered by personal experiences. And now he is beginning to solve the mysteries of his existence.
“My life has been changed forever,” he says. “And my purpose is to be a bright light for everybody that I touch and connect with.”

In March, Poyer will return to Resonance for another retreat. Also planning to go are his cousin who went with him last year, and some first-timers — his mother, brother, a couple of friends and possibly a couple of teammates. He will be working on a documentary about ayahuasca.

A handpan is a steel musical instrument that generates sound through vibrations. Sound healers and meditators often play the handpan. In Costa Rica, Poyer heard one for the first time and was drawn to it. Now he plays his frequently.

Not long ago, Rachel returned home at about 10 p.m. and was tidying up the kitchen when, in the peace of the night, she heard something coming from the outside balcony upstairs — ethereal, haunting sounds.

“It was kind of like something you would hear in a dream,” Rachel says.

It was music the old Jordan Poyer never could have made.