Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2022. View the full list.
In the autumn of 2000 — which for the New England Patriots means prehistoric times — four young players with NFL dreams shared living quarters at 9 Cherrywood Lane in the town of Franklin, Mass., about seven miles from old Foxboro Stadium.
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The arrangement began when rookie backup quarterback Tom Brady, a sixth-round pick in the 2000 NFL Draft, bought the modest townhouse from Ty Law for $265,000, as the veteran cornerback was moving to pricier digs after signing a lucrative contract the previous summer. Brady may have been flush with NFL cash, but his $193,000 rookie salary was not so rich that it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple of housemates.
He invited two other rookies, Purdue defensive lineman David Nugent and Harvard tight end Chris Eitzmann, to join him. And then there was linebacker Matt Chatham, who just sort of showed up now and then. “I was living in a shitty apartment,” Chatham later explained. “I was better off sleeping on a couch in the basement of their place.”
The story was dusted off from time to time as Brady established his bona fides as the best quarterback in NFL history. As recently as September, Tom Curran of NBC Sports Boston interviewed Nugent and Eitzmann about being housemates with Brady, discussing such topics as their fierce “Tecmo Bowl” battles. Eitzmann, wearing a T-shirt and ball cap and speaking via video from home, cited Brady’s video game demeanor as foreshadowing his future as a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
“If he was losing,” said Eitzmann, “he was going to try to find a way to make sure the game didn’t end.”
Three months after that video was published, on Dec. 29, Eitzmann was found dead in his apartment at The Smith, an upscale building on 89 East Dedham Street in Boston’s South End. He was 44. Later, it was determined he died from issues related to alcohol disorder. On Jan. 8, one day before Brady would play the final regular-season game of his storied NFL career, Nugent and Chatham traveled to Deshler, Neb., a tiny city near the Kansas border, to attend Eitzmann’s funeral.
Under other circumstances, Nugent, Chatham and other first-year Patriots from 2000 might have looked at Brady’s trip to the playoffs — and, a few weeks later, his retirement announcement — as another opportunity to reminisce. The new players at training camp in 2000 — Bill Belichick’s first season as Pats head coach — represented the beginning of a major roster overhaul that culminated a year later with the first Super Bowl championship in franchise history; even those who were not around for the 2001 season can take pride in that.
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They were young, they were hungry, and — except to draft geeks and savvy Pats fans interested in depth charts and roster projections — they were unknown. They competed for roster spots that summer, worked out together and took occasional trips up to Boston to explore the nightlife. During the preseason, they lived at the truck-stoppy End Zone Motor Lodge.
Now they were mourning Chris Eitzmann, a much-respected Harvard football captain from small-town Nebraska signed by the Patriots as an undrafted free agent following the 2000 draft — and who made enough of an impression on Belichick that he eventually wound up on the 53-man roster.

Nugent, who played parts of two seasons with the Patriots, was home in Memphis when he learned of Eitzmann’s passing and decided to attend the funeral. Chatham, whose six seasons with the Patriots earned him three Super Bowl rings, traveled from the Boston area for the service.
“We really felt it was important to have some of the people from that part of his life be able to make it,” Chatham said. “Obviously Tommy (Brady) wasn’t able to be there, in the middle of a playoff run, but Dave and I were able to make it.”
Since Chatham grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, about 90 minutes north of Omaha, he made plans with friends from home to join him at Eppley Airfield in Omaha for a few hours until Nugent’s flight from Memphis arrived. Then the two former teammates rented a car and drove to Peace Lutheran Church in Deshler, 159 miles southwest.
“I hadn’t seen much of Dave over the years, either,” said Chatham. “So for the drive down, it was catching up with an old friend, and we spent the trip reminiscing about Eitz and telling old stories, sort of a pseudo-sad, pseudo-happy, life-reflection kind of time. Obviously too bad it had to happen under those circumstances.”
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According to an obituary posted online, Eitzmann’s survivors included his wife Mikaela and their four children. News of Eitzmann’s death was also posted on the website classy.org, with a link to the Concussion Legacy Foundation, co-founded by Chris Nowinski, himself a former Harvard football player and teammate of Eitzmann.
“It was when (Chris) had children that he discovered his true passion, being a father,” the announcement read. “As a Dad, what he wanted most was to encourage his children’s curiosity and their understanding of unconditional love. Chris also cherished playing ‘Coach Dad’ and passed on his love for sports to his kids.”
And there is this: “As part of Chris’s legacy, the Eitzmann family has started the Chris Eitzmann Memorial Fund for CTE Research at the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Chris loved the game of football, but even more he loved the friends he made through the game. Through this fund we aim to help and heal football players and their families while fighting chronic traumatic encephalopathy.”
The classy.org announcement — an essay, really — was written by Mikaela Eitzmann, who confirmed to The Athletic that her husband’s brain was donated to the Boston University CTE Center co-founded by Nowinski. It took Mikaela a couple of days to put her thoughts together before she could sit down and write the essay. She had to sort things out, decide what to say, what not to say. She enlisted the help of her sister, Danielle, the two of them working in her bedroom late into the night after the kids had been put to bed.

“I want so badly for our kids to remember him for the person that he was, how amazing he was, all the things that he did,” Mikaela Eitzmann told The Athletic. “He was an incredible human being.”
But, she said, “He had some struggles. He did change, he just … changed. I think he didn’t understand himself and what was happening. He just knew he felt different, and things like that are really hard because no one can tell you why you feel the way you do, but you know you don’t feel like yourself any longer.
“He was always so strong, and he’d often say he can do anything he puts his mind to. He would always persevere. I think he struggled with wondering why it was so hard for him to overcome this. It was tough.”
The Patriots’ signing of Eitzmann following the 2000 NFL Draft didn’t get much attention. But then, not much of anything the Patriots did that spring was hot off the presses. The big story had already played out, when, in late January, the Patriots parted with their first-round pick — No. 16 — to pry Belichick from the New York Jets.
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The Brady pick at No. 199 overall didn’t merit much analysis (the Boston Herald’s Mike Felger called it “a curious selection, given the presence of backup quarterbacks Michael Bishop and John Friesz”), but the selection of Nugent later in the sixth round earned a few thumbs-up. The Patriots drafted fourth-rounder Jeff Marriott and Nugent “for depth on the line,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo, explaining that Belichick believed them to be “a good value because other teams who don’t play the two-gap system were not interested in those players.”
Eitzmann?
The day of his first rookie workout he told reporters, “I know I’m a long shot, but I feel I belong. I feel like I can do what they want a tight end to do in their offense, which is run, block and be able to run down the field and catch the football.
“I don’t want to come close to using that Harvard degree,” Eitzmann added. “Hopefully 20 years down the road I can use it.”
He was waived in late August, picked up by the Green Bay Packers for a week, released again and then added to the Patriots’ practice squad. He was promoted to the Patriots’ 53-man roster in October and appeared in five games, starting one, before a season-ending rib injury. Brady appeared in just one game in 2000, seeing a couple minutes of garbage time in New England’s 34-9 Thanksgiving Day loss to the Lions.
When you read all those stories about the work Brady did in 2000 — logging hours and hours after practice to hone his skills and hopefully get noticed — it sometimes gets mentioned, but often doesn’t, that Eitzmann was always out there with him.

“We hit it off pretty well right off the bat, from a friendship standpoint, and on the field, I think that’s really where it developed,” Eitzmann told NBC Sports Boston of his relationship with Brady. “We both had similar work ethics. I always wanted to stay after and just run some extra routes.
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“I’d run routes, he’d throw and we’d basically go until I couldn’t go anymore. He’d always want to keep going longer, but I’m like, at some point my legs are dying and I can’t do this.”
Chatham, who signed with the Pats after spending two years with the St. Louis Rams without getting into a game, joined them for post-practice work.
“Chris and I battled constantly in these things they called ‘opportunity periods,'” Chatham said. “We’d go half-line, which is one half of an offensive line versus one half of a defensive line, and we’d go play after play after play. He was a big challenge.
“Brady and him would wear each other out. It was a who’s-going-to-quit-first kind of thing.”
The Patriots brought back Eitzmann in 2001 but cut him near the end of training camp. He hooked on with the Cleveland Browns without appearing in a game and had a stint with the Frankfurt Galaxy in NFL Europe. By 2002 he was out of football, and it was time to put that Harvard degree to use.
Born in Belleville, Kan., on April 1, 1977, Eitzmann was raised on a farm in Hardy, Neb., and attended Chester-Hubbell-Byron High, where, in addition to track and basketball, he was a member of the school’s eight-man football team.
He could have accepted an offer to walk on at Nebraska — playing for the Cornhuskers is every kid’s dream in this part of the world — but Eitzmann’s classroom work was as spectacular as anything he did on the football field. These qualities — size, skills, smarts — drew the attention of Harvard coach Tim Murphy, who early in 1995, as he was preparing for his second season with the Crimson, flew to Omaha and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to southern Nebraska to visit the Eitzmann family.
“I remember vividly coming in the door, and I see his young siblings with Nebraska jerseys on,” Murphy said. “So I laugh, I get the joke — only it was no joke. I was the enemy. I’m thinking, OK, this is where this kid’s going to school.”
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Murphy wasn’t the only coach to visit the area. Tom Osborne, the legendary Nebraska coach whose Cornhuskers were coming off a national championship season — and would win another title in dominant fashion in 1995 — showed up at one of Eitzmann’s basketball games against Hillcrest High of nearby Cuba, Kan. Pregame introductions were stopped to announce Osborne’s arrival in the gym.
Dan Young, a Nebraska assistant coach, highlighted the significance of Osborne’s visit to the small high school when he told Ken Hambleton of the Lincoln Journal Star, “I think there’s one Sports Illustrated that Tom didn’t sign.” According to the Belleville (Kan.) Telescope, “The Harvard University coach was also at the game, but his line was much, much shorter.”
It was actually Mike Foley, Harvard’s offensive coordinator at the time, who was at the game. In the end, though, Murphy’s visit to the Eitzmann home made the difference.
“About two weeks after I made my recruiting visit to Harvard, Coach Murphy came to see me,” Eitzmann told the Journal Star. “I knew I had to go that way.”

Could Eitzmann have excelled at Nebraska? At the time, was Murphy sure he could play at Harvard?
“It was a little projection that he was going to play Division I college football coming from eight-man football, but he was one of those John Wayne-type of guys,” said Murphy. “He didn’t talk a whole lot. He just took everything in. And when he did have questions, they were very good questions.”
For a kid from rural Nebraska, Eitzmann made a surprisingly easy transition to life in Cambridge, though he would later tell Lincoln Journal Star sportswriter Mark Derowitsch he was a little homesick at first. “Once practice started, I began meeting people and realized I wasn’t any different,” he said. “We were all here because we wanted to be here and because we loved football.”
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One of Eitzmann’s first roommates was Scott Larkee, now Harvard’s defensive coordinator and assistant head coach. They were two freshmen from small-town rural America living at Quincy House, Eitzmann from farm country on the Nebraska-Kansas border, and Larkee, whose parents owned a traveling carnival, hailing from Waupaca, Wisc. But with a population of over 5,000, Waupaca is a metropolis compared to Eitzmann’s hometown, Hardy, and its population of around 150.
“What I didn’t know at the time was how really remote the area Chris was from,” Larkee said. “It was a lot different from where I was from, a very unique place, so much more rural. I remember seeing Chris’s yearbook when we were freshmen. I think there were 13 people in his senior class. The senior photos didn’t fill up the second page. I think two of them were his cousins.”
Eitzmann returned home for a few months after his freshman year. He was by now a legit local celebrity — tall, handsome and athletic — who made headlines when he was whisked off to Harvard. It was during that 1996 summer — Saturday night, July 13, to be exact — that Mikaela Kempf spotted Eitzmann at the 100th annual Diller Picnic in Diller, Neb., about 60 miles east of Hardy. The event is more festival than picnic, a three-day affair attracting folks from miles around for the fireworks, parades, tractor pulls and other events. The big draw Saturday night at the 1996 Diller Picnic was a street dance featuring The Rumbles, a popular Midwest rock ‘n’ roll band.
“I’m at this dance, and I see this man standing across from where I’m standing,” Mikaela said. “He’s really big, I don’t know, I think he was up to 220 pounds by then. He had a presence. I knew immediately who it was. I was feeling courageous, and I just walked up to him.
“I actually stole his cap, which is such a cliche thing to do, but I was going into my senior year in high school, so that’s the mentality, I guess. I told him if he wanted it back, he was going to have to call me.”
Eitzmann made the call. And when he returned to Cambridge a month later to begin his second year at Harvard, it was with the understanding that Mikaela, entering her senior year at Shickley High, was his girlfriend. As for that old Oakley ball cap, he never bothered to ask for it back.

During Thanksgiving weekend, Mikaela made her first plane trip when she traveled to Boston to visit Chris.
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“I can’t believe my father let me do that,” she said. “I would never let my 18-year-old daughter do that. But my father, he just loved Chris.”
Mikaela graduated from Shickley High in the spring of 1997 and attended Nebraska Wesleyan University for a year. And then she transferred to Boston College.
“I had been doing the long-distance traveling from Nebraska to Boston, and we both hated it,” she said. “And my dad eventually caved. He raised four girls, and when I started dating Chris, he and my dad just developed this really special relationship. They got along so well. Dad was not worried about me going off to Boston with Chris. He was worried about the city aspect, but he felt OK about me going there because he knew Chris was there.”
A psychology major, Eitzmann was building a solid academic resume. On the football field, he was all about hard work and team-building. Brendan Bibro, Harvard’s captain in 1997 and ’98, became so close with Eitzmann that “he was one of the few guys I could just sit with in silence, be in a room and not say anything and not feel uncomfortable. He kind of had a way of putting you at ease without even trying.”
Bibro lived in Quincy House as well. He and Eitzmann later took a year away from Harvard to recover from injuries, and, having secured internships with Boston area finance companies — Bibro at New Boston Real Estate, Eitzmann with hedge fund Hellman Jordan — shared a second-floor walk-up on L Street in Southie.
“We were two meatheads living together,” said Bibro, 46, now running a finance business and living in Princeton, N.J. “We would cook a dozen eggs in the morning for breakfast. After work we would drive over to Harvard at night to lift together. It was really a sporting lifestyle. That was it. We’d work, we’d go work out, we would eat as much food as possible.
“Looking back on it, it was a great experience and a fond memory, hanging out and doing what we love.”
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Eitzmann grew from around 215 pounds as a freshman to a hulking 6-4, 250 pounds by the time he was a senior in 1999. He also grew in stature, being named captain of the Crimson — as in the captain. Harvard, like archrival Yale, elects one captain annually; as Larkee put it, “Huge deal. Voted on by the team. The best of the best.”
Eitzmann shared a place with Chris Nowinski and linebacker Isaiah Kacyvenski on DeWolfe Street in Cambridge in early 2000. This was before Eitzmann left for training camp with the Patriots, and before Kacyvenski, selected in the fourth round of the 2000 NFL Draft by the Seattle Seahawks, headed west to begin what would be a seven-year pro career.
“Me on the lower bunk, Isaiah on the top bunk, Chris on the futon,” said Nowinski. “Chris was a great friend, and as my college captain was the best of us.”
Among Eitzmann’s many accolades during his years at Harvard: According to the 2000 Patriots media guide, he was a 1999 first-team All-American selection by “Successful Farming” magazine, “which honors successful collegiate athletes who live on a farm or ranch.” Eitzmann opened his senior year with two catches totaling 42 yards in the Crimson’s 24-7 victory over Columbia. He also raced over, bear-hugged receiver Terence Patterson and hoisted him in the air after the senior scored a 30-yard touchdown on a reverse.

“That sort of started that ritual of him hoisting me or whoever was in the end zone,” said Patterson. “He would hoist me in the air, and I’d get the slap on the helmet, saying, ‘Great job, TP.’
“He and I were about as night and day as you can get,” Patterson continued. “I was a pretty outgoing, boisterous receiver from Memphis, Tenn., and he was a pretty subdued, intense guy from the Midwest. We sort of met in the middle because we cared about winning, we loved football and we loved our teammates.”
Eitzmann and Mikaela, who married in 2003, settled in the Boston area for several years and began raising a family.
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After his playing career ended, Chris wasted no time expanding his curriculum vitae, earning an MBA from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. While some former Patriots teammates remained in the spotlight as coaches or media members — Chatham has written for The Athletic and provided football analysis for NESN — Eitzmann went to work in finance and ceased to be a public person, other than when he’d be tracked down to talk about those early days with Brady.
In December 2017, Mike Kempf, Mikaela’s father who loved Eitzmann like a son, was killed in a car crash in Geneva, Neb. The Kempf farm, 4,000 acres on which corn and soybeans are grown, has been in the family since Mikaela’s great-grandfather, Jay Kempf, started it in 1943.
“So we moved back home,” said Mikaela. “In the long run, we always wanted to come back to Nebraska. It was going to be when he was ready to be done in the financial world, we would retire, maybe the kids would be grown, and the plan was for him to take over my dad’s part of our family farm. When Dad died, that kind of advanced our plan.
“We packed up and moved our kids and our life here, looking to keep the farm going. And he liked that part, because farming is now a lot more financial than it was a long, long time ago.”

Patterson and Eitzmann were in and out of touch over the years. “We would text now and then, or a quick call,” Paterson said. “I went to Kellogg (School of Management at Northwestern University), he went to Tuck at Dartmouth, and there was a connection point.”
In communications with other former teammates, Patterson said, “Obviously through the years guys would allude to stuff. … I didn’t know the severity of what he was facing.”
Said Bibro, “Some of the issues started to come up maybe three to five years ago. He stopped coming to a lot of stuff, or as much stuff as he had. It’s at a time of your life when people have kids, people get busy. It wasn’t completely out of the ordinary. But I talked with him, everybody kind of had a long talk with him, (last) summer.
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“It was clear he was dealing with addiction issues by that point, and more than anybody of us realized,” Bibro said. “It was hard, yeah.”
Former teammates say they were aware Eitzmann was battling alcoholism. Some had taken part in an intervention. Others had checked in via text messages and phone calls.
“Chris had been struggling,” said Kacyvenski, Eitzmann’s former Harvard teammate. “I think a lot of people didn’t know, and then we were made aware of it about a year ago, and trying to get him some help.”
Alcoholism is an emotional topic for Kacyvenski. Growing up in Endicott, N.Y., he and four siblings often suffered the wrath of an abusive, alcoholic father, with things sometimes getting so out of control that the family careened toward homelessness and scouring dumpsters for food. He has always been candid about his family’s struggles, notably as part of a documentary in which he participated. The doc is jarring at its core and yet, in the end, offers a message of hope as Isaiah’s father, Dave Kacyvenski, gets sober. He apologizes for the beatings. Father and son remain close to this day.
“When we found out about Chris — close friends, teammates, everyone from Harvard who was pulled in a year ago,” said Kacyvenski, “we tried to do as much as possible to make sure he saw light at the end of the tunnel and really turn things around.”
Kacyvenski, who later earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School, remembers Eitzmann as “an amazing human being, he just was.”
Brady quarterbacked the Patriots to six Super Bowl championships, plus another last year with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was the last player from New England’s 2000 rookie class still wearing an NFL uniform. But while Brady’s retirement became the biggest story in football, Eitzmann’s death went unnoticed except to family, friends and his teammates.
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Nugent recalled the text reunions that would take place whenever someone in the media wanted to rehash the story about when he, Eitzmann and Brady were housemates, with Chatham crashing on the couch downstairs.

“Whenever we’d get hit up with an interview about living with Tom Brady, we’d text each other, saying, ‘Hey, did you get contacted by so and so today?'” Nugent said. “And then we’d go back and forth, sharing stories that maybe we had forgotten about so we could bring them up in the interview.”
Recalling a text exchange before the NBC Sports Boston interview, Nugent said, “It made me reflect more on the relationships I’ve had in the past. Going forward, I want to be more intentional on checking in with people and maybe digging a little deeper into their life and how they’re doing, not just take things at surface level. Man, I really wish I had dug in a little more, asked Chris more questions and really got to know truly how he was doing.
“I’ve been looking back on all the text messages,” he said. “They were fun, they were happy, there was no indication anything negative was going on at all.”
To Nugent, 44, now a sales representative with Abbott Laboratories and living in Collierville, Tenn., with his wife and three kids, being in training camp with the Patriots in 2000 now seems like a thousand years ago. “Once I started having kids, I stopped remembering life before I had kids,” he said, half-kidding. “There’s your life after football.”
One of the former teammates Nugent has stayed in touch with — again, mostly via text messages — is Casey Tisdale, a seventh-round pick in 2000. Tisdale reached out to Nugent as soon as he heard Eitzmann had died.
“I asked (Nugent), have you been having any issues?” said Tisdale, 45, now a regional vice president for Olympus, married with four kids and living in Austin, Texas. “I told him I was OK, and he said the same.”

As is often the case with rookie NFL hopefuls, especially late-round picks, Tisdale’s exit from the Patriots was not a big newsmaker. He was settling in for a team meeting on a Monday morning in late August at Foxboro Stadium when he noticed something was missing.
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“I was searching for my playbook, and there wasn’t one there for me,” he said. “I was with Chris Eitzmann, and he did have one. We both knew what the deal was.”
Yes, Eitzmann was still with the team, at least for the time being. Tisdale was not, apparently. He had walked into the meeting room before a team official could guide him into the office of Belichick, who was soon diplomatically explaining to Tisdale that cuts had to be made, the team was going in a different direction, good luck with your future endeavors, etc.
But in relaying the story, Tisdale quickly circled back to Eitzmann, to a degree that we had several conversations about him over the next two days.
“Chris and I, it’s not like we were close after the fact,” said Tisdale. “I went to three other teams after the Patriots, and he had his stint and moved on to other teams. But his death still hits home, because I had a lot of good times with Chris.
“The guy was brilliant,” Tisdale added. “He was a Nebraska kid who went to Harvard and was a Dartmouth MBA. And then you read the obituary, you read about his family, his kids …”
One member of the Patriots’ 2000 rookie class who hadn’t heard about Eitzmann’s death was J.R. Redmond, the third-round running back from Arizona State. Redmond played a key role in the Patriots’ game-winning drive in Super Bowl XXXVI, catching three passes from Brady for 24 yards, including one where he dragged a Rams defender out of bounds to stop the clock.
“When I looked at Eitz, he was like a soldier to me,” Redmond said. “I was, damn, look at this dude. His tight limbs, he’s muscular … And to me, he was a real simple, genuine, good person.”

Redmond, now 44 and living in Los Angeles after a five-year NFL career, spoke candidly about his issues with depression.
“I personally went through a seven-year battle, and I was hospitalized for six months and on psychiatric meds,” said Redmond, who said he hopes to start a foundation to assist people who have suffered similarly. “It’s real … getting brain scans, finding out that I have pre-frontal lobe brain damage, swelling all over my brain. I haven’t played in almost 20 years, 18 years. There’s no way my brain should still be swollen like that.”
Tim Murphy, who in 1995 flew to Omaha and then drove to Hardy, Neb., to visit the Eitzmann family and invite Scott and Connie’s son to take his talents to Cambridge, returned to the area in January. This time it was to attend Chris Eitzmann’s funeral.
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“I had a lot of time for reflection that day,” Murphy said. “My first flight was canceled because of a snowstorm. … I got there just in time. I walk into this Lutheran church in this very tiny farming community and it’s packed with 400 people. I saw Chris’s mom and dad. They waved me over. We hugged. It was so sad. To see parents have to bury their son. To see a wife and family have to bury their dad.
“He was one of the great all-time kids,” Murphy said.
Scott Larkee made the trip as well, joined by his wife, Judy, their son, Sam, and their daughter, Shea, a high school freshman whose godfather was Chris Eitzmann.
“Everybody really admired Chris — everybody,” said Larkee.

Over the years, Larkee said, their families would take joint vacations at a lake house Eitzmann owned in New Hampshire.
“The last I’d seen of him was during the summer, and it was his latest attempt at rehab,” Larkee said. “And then football season started. And he was back home in Nebraska for most of the fall.”
David Nugent and Matt Chatham also arrived just in time for the funeral, but not in time to find a seat inside the church. They were directed to the basement, where the service was live-streamed. Later they attended a lunch gathering for those who had attended the funeral, with Chatham noting the cross-section of people from Eitzmann’s life who attended.
“Chris had a real wide canvas of friends, from his NFL life, his Harvard years and all that,” he said. “Plus all his friends from back home.”
After the luncheon, Nugent and Chatham got back into the rental car to drive to Omaha, traveling along the same Nebraska plains that had been the starting point on Eitzmann’s journey from Chester-Hubbell-Byron High to Harvard and the NFL. Yes, there were more fun stories from those days back in 2000 with Eitzmann, with Brady, with all the rest.
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Good times. And yet …
“The whole ride, and even over dinner in Omaha,” said Nugent, “we’re saying, ‘What happened to our buddy?'”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos courtesy of Harvard University)
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