Not Your Average Bear

“Fashion is something new for me — something I did when I started getting some more money in my pocket. My fourth year, I got deeper into it, having ideas of different things I wanted to wear. Like when I had on a fur coat and hat — I had seen Denzel Washington in American Gangster.”

“We had a talented defense last year, but we didn’t play to our standard. Some of it is the partnership with player and coach, but at the end of the day, if you make plays, you make plays — the coach doesn’t stop you from making plays. We have to take more pride in what we do. We have to get that blue-collar, hard-work mentality. I’m not saying we don’t have it, but we can take it up another level.”

“When I get an interception, it feels like when you were a kid and were told not to go get cookies out of the pantry and you did it anyway: You got away with it.”

“I like to push the lines as much as I can, even on the field. I was one of the first guys to wear orange long sleeves with the navy-blue-and-white jerseys. Equipment people were like, ‘You’re not supposed to do that.’”

“Every Sunday I want to make a statement with my outfits. It became a thing last season — not just with teammates but everybody in the building, like ‘What are you wearing this week?’”

“When we played the Commanders in Washington, D.C., I went to the Lincoln Memorial. I tried to get a few teammates to go, but everybody already had dinner plans. I ate at a soul food spot right around the corner from the memorial and then I called an Uber. I told the driver, ‘Hey, I want to drive around.’ I just had my own little tour, and he told me about each of the buildings. I was thinking about Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. For me, being a small-town kid from Fresno, California, I had the opportunity to really soak in where such a legendary and monumental thing happened. I called my fiancée and was like, ‘Bae, I just have so much gratitude.’”