Fantasy Pick

At 24, Christian McCaffrey is already considered the best running back in the NFL, a rare combination of freakish athletic ability, monastic discipline, and brainy studiousness. So we thought we'd quiz him in a homemade game of GQ Jeopardy!
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I'm going easy on Christian McCaffrey to start things off. I think. I'll be playing the role of Alex Trebek, and the first Jeopardy! category is Famous Christians. Let's see how this goes.

“For $400,” says McCaffrey.

Here's your clue. This is the title of the Night Ranger song that goes: “MOTORIN'… WHAT'S…YOUR…PRICE…FOR FLIGHT?”

“What is…”

This one's a little ageist, because I'm old and you're not.

“It is. And my dad”—that would be former NFL wideout and Super Bowl champion Ed McCaffrey—“would be pissed at me if I didn't know it. What is…uh… I don't know?”

Robe, $495, by Paul Stuart / Shoes (price upon request), by Gucci / Sunglasses, stylist’s own

It's July and the Carolina Panthers star running back and I are on a Zoom call. McCaffrey's hair is cropped short and he's wearing a gray Nike hoodie that makes me worry that he's overheated. Ah, but only his CAREER is steaming right now, my friends. At 24, McCaffrey is already All-Pro and the consensus No. 1 pick in fantasy football. He's also NFL royalty: Dad played for the Giants, Niners, and Broncos; elder brother Max had a brief NFL career and is now an assistant coach under Dad at the University of Northern Colorado; and his younger brothers, Luke and Dylan, are both quarterbacks for Division I schools. I have a lot I want to ask Christian—about Cam Newton leaving the team, about how he takes care of his body in quarantine, about the NFL's response to Black Lives Matter. You know, important shit.

But Zoom calls are awkward and miserable, no matter who happens to be residing in your browser during one. And so, being the resourceful journalist that I am, I stumbled upon an elegant solution to the problem. Before asking McCaffrey the hard stuff, I have designed an online Jeopardy! board for our Stanford alum turned breakout football star in an attempt to test his mettle. To see if a game show quiz could reveal new dimensions of a man who is singularly devoted to his craft. I've taken a risk and guessed that McCaffrey would be the kind of meticulous, obsessive competitor who would get very into Jeopardy! answers, especially concerning '80s power ballads that I sing the chorus of. I have guessed right.

“What is ‘Sister Christian’?” I reveal to him.

“ ‘Sister Christian’!” he says, annoyed at himself. “God.”


Watch Now:

10 Things Christian McCaffrey Can't Live Without

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McCaffrey had to push back this session of ours by a day because he got sick. When I heard the news, my first thought was, Oh, my God, did he get the coronavirus? But no, as of this writing, Christian McCaffrey has not contracted COVID-19. He says he ate some bad fish while on a trip to the Bahamas with his girlfriend, 2012 Miss Universe winner Olivia Culpo. “I spent the whole day in the bathroom,” he says. “I'm not even kidding you. Probably six hours.”

That's somehow almost worse than contracting the coronavirus, but not quite. Despite traveling to the Caribbean, our man says he's been a good boy during the pandemic, keeping mostly to his condo in Charlotte and his parents' house in Colorado, where he's from. “I was pretty locked down,” he says. “I really didn't do anything.”

Not doing anything when you happen to be a world-class athlete who runs a 4.48 40 time can be an enervating proposition. Especially for McCaffrey, who was a three-sport star in high school—basketball and track being the others. And so I ask a question that he's heard 700 times from everyone during the pandemic: How do you stay in shape if you've got to stay more or less housebound?

“When it came to training,” he says, “it was the best thing ever because I had no travel, so I was never interrupted.”

Unburdened by “voluntary” team workouts and P.R. obligations, McCaffrey set up a strict regimen in which his younger brothers served as rotating surrogates for new Panthers QB Teddy Bridgewater, to run through drills and learn the offense of new head coach Matt Rhule from afar. For a long time, he used a public field five minutes from his parents' house that was secluded enough for him and his crew to train and maintain social distancing in peace. It's where he finds himself most comfortable.

“I started getting to the point where I loved quarantine,” McCaffrey admits. “Part of me has been trying to social distance myself for a long time now.”

I had never considered that upside for famous people during all this. For once, everyone has to leave them the fuck alone.


Piano Men

In addition to being a handsome famous athlete who dates a Miss Universe winner, McCaffrey is known for playing the piano quite well. He took it up in eighth grade, after a friend told him it would help him get girls. Now it's how he relaxes in his downtime: playing Chopin and whatnot flawlessly. It's disgusting, really. I made a category for it.

“Piano Men for $200.”

Before you, there was another Panthers running back known for his skills tickling the ivories.

“Who is Jonathan Stewart?”

That is correct.


Shorts, $185, and kerchief slider, $72, by RTH / Hat, $145, by Stetson / Pocket square (worn as scarf), $85, by Paul Stuart

Stewart spent a decade with the Panthers and retired as the team's all-time rush leader. In 2019, he praised McCaffrey as the future of the franchise, a “one of a kind” talent that “no one's seen” before. He was right. McCaffrey has proved himself to be the potential second coming of Marshall Faulk, the Hall of Fame running back whom former Rams assistant coach Al Saunders once described as the queen of the chessboard. McCaffrey is deathly quick between the tackles and can use that same speed to break any short pass for a zillion yards. He can do anything. And without Cam, he's gonna have to do even more of it.

McCaffrey will be heading into this season with a QB with whom he was able to work out, in person, a grand total of one time prior to training camp, and with an entirely new offensive system to learn. If you've ever played football—and I have—you know that a playbook may as well be written in a dead tongue. It's impossible to parse, especially if you can't physically walk through each formation and drill with your teammates and coaches. Any NFL team coming into this season with continuity at head coach and QB would seem to be at an inherent advantage over teams like the Panthers, who are starting from scratch now that quarterback Cam Newton is gone.

“Cam was someone who helped me have more fun with football,” says McCaffrey, who is the new centerpiece of the team whether he likes it or not. “I'll always be thankful to him for that. He saw that if I made a mistake, I would be very hard on myself. But he would celebrate the good plays. It was something you could do as a team. He would talk a lot of mess and laugh and still have success.” During his nine years with the Panthers, not only was Newton the most exciting player in football, but he also took the team to the Super Bowl and gave them an identity—a legacy, really—that they had lacked since coming into the league as an expansion team in 1995. Cam was the Panthers.

Those laughs petered out at the end. Newton was sacked nearly 300 times in Carolina, and that's not even counting playoff games. The Panthers used up his body with such fervor that, in an off-season when no team could work out free agents, it took three months before any other team would deign to sign him. (The team that did, naturally, ended up being the Patriots. They signed him for nothing.)

Did you feel like the Panthers protected Cam properly? I know refs didn't protect him, but do you feel that the way that Cam was handled was okay for him and his longevity?

“It's hard to not utilize all of his skills. One of the best parts about Cam's game is he can do everything.”

Ah, but that's the temptation. “Well, look, it's Cam Newton. He's the best athlete in the sport. He's built like a goddamn tank. He can do anything.” Of course, he's human. So if he does too much of everything, then it's going to wear him down.

“I think that's a very good way of putting it,” says McCaffrey diplomatically. “It's all about balance.”

McCaffrey's father, Ed, was himself a Pro Bowler. He also suffered two concussions in three weeks in his final season as a professional, and surely more of them before that. As the son of an NFL player, Christian, who has been through the concussion protocol himself, has had a chance to see someone from the previous generation age in real time. And if you've seen former NFL players in person or heard them speak, you've seen how much damage this sport can do.

In terms of your life after football, has being in your dad's presence encouraged you in that regard, or has it given you some pause and some reasons to worry?

“It's extremely encouraging. I mean, he took care of his body extremely well when he played, and still does now. He hardly ever drinks, if he does. Doesn't smoke. He's on top of his body, especially when he played, he was almost a psychopath about what he ate, when he slept, when he woke up, when he trained. So to see where he's at now is extremely encouraging, because he feels fine, his energy is great, he looks good. So yeah, I'd say it's very encouraging.”


Shirt, $98, by Polo Ralph Lauren
Physics

“For $400.”

According to Einstein, and although certain NFL players may disagree, no physical object or person can travel faster than the speed of this.

“What is light?”

That is correct.

“I was debating between light and sound.”

You've gotten both physics questions so far correct.

“I know, don't jinx me there.”

I don't. He ends up sweeping the Physics category.


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Like everyone else in the NFL, McCaffrey has never had to endure an off-season where he can't work out with his teammates. So how precisely does an NFL team become a team if they can't prepare together?

The answer, unfortunately, is meetings. Lots of them. For the Panthers, these meetings include quizzes, which are not nearly as fun as my questions about nuclear fission. McCaffrey has to sit with coaches for two hours every day virtually, double the length of traditional meetings. The downside of that is OH GOD, A TWO-HOUR MEETING EVERY FUCKING DAY. The upside is that, in these extended sessions, McCaffrey can learn more about what everyone else on the offense has to do and get a deeper understanding of the scheme in the process, and can then train without feeling micromanaged to death.

Take his body. Even in a league where players obsess over their physical abilities, McCaffrey, at an ordinary-seeming five eleven and 208 pounds, is an outlier. Running back is one of the most brutal positions in the sport, and he has to train like a monk around the clock to keep the engine running. But at his level of play, there's an even deeper physiological awareness that he has to maintain at all times. To a fanatical degree. His mechanics cannot be off. He and one of his many trainers must continually refine and recalibrate if he wants to remain better at football than people who are already better than anyone else at it.

“I need corrections,” says McCaffrey. “I don't train the same as I did last year because I had 400 touches in a season going into year four. You look at guys like Tom Brady… I'm sure he trains differently now than he did five years ago. In order to continue to succeed, you have to adapt in your training and in development.”

This is where it gets interesting. McCaffrey has to operate in a world where his body is its own game plan. Preparing for the Saints and preparing his body for the Saints are one in the same. He has to study the tape. If he has an injury—and this is football, so he always does—he has to adjust his technique to accommodate for that injury in a way that prevents him from exacerbating it while still allowing him to perform to the best of his ability.

“I've discovered that football players and professional athletes, in general, are professional compensators,” he says. “They can adjust to tweaks here and there without actually physically fixing the issue. Now the goal, for the next week, is to get back to square one so you don't have to continue to compensate. And that's the difficulty of it.”

This approach is a decidedly modern one. I grew up laboring under the mantra that pain is weakness leaving the body, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, etc. All of that was horseshit. You must be constantly aware of your body and be sensitive to it, which is a cruel irony given that football is a sport designed to obliterate that same body. McCaffrey, like Tom Brady, wants to play football for as long as he possibly can. That means that he has dedicated the near entirety of his energy toward honing his body so that it can withstand the rigors of something that it was not intended to withstand. And right here, right now, I'm willing to drink the snake oil and say that he's pretty good at that honing. He's never missed a game since he was drafted in 2017.

That's surely due in part to good luck, but also due to… Well, I'll let him explain:

“If I get done with training and my right hip flexor is sore, but my left is not, there's a reason. Something's off, right? So we'll check my pelvis. We'll check the psoas. We'll check my T-spine, make sure everything's moving, make sure I don't have a rib out or something's off, and we'll adjust it. The misconception about training is ‘We have to work into the ground. We have to make it extremely hard for you. You should be dead tired after.’ [But] you're actually detraining when you're working on a fatigue system. The goal is to be full speed neurally. You shouldn't play tired. You shouldn't train tired. Otherwise you're training a depleted system with poor mechanics. If I'm taking an off step, or I'm not dorsiflexing enough, or an ankle is loud, [my personal trainers] can hear it in the sequencing and timing of the sound. You can't train the way the top athletes in the world train without the correct treatment. You need both. You can't have one without the other.”

I didn't know ankles could be loud. But noticing such things is vital for McCaffrey's career and for his well-being. To show me how he prepares, McCaffrey holds his phone up to the screen and queues up videos of a dude doing something called “animal movements”: leaping bear crawls; upside-down crab walks, as if possessed by a demon; Frankenstein walks where he leans way back but remains on his tiptoes. “Basically you're training as if you're a tiger, or a duck, or a gorilla,” he says, “so that when you get on the field and you get hit and you're in one of those positions, you've already been there before. You're trying to make your body elastic and explosive at the same time.”

Every exercise McCaffrey shows me looks extremely awkward and painful, which is the point. Playing football is awkward and painful. When I played offensive line, we duckwalked in practice to train. It was horrible. And now here I am, compelled to attempt such exercises once more. I try to do the tiptoe Frankenstein walk for McCaffrey while we're on our call. I feel like I'm going to topple over.

Oh God, oh God.

“I can't see your feet, but you're probably good,” he says encouragingly. “Probably spot-on.”


Shirt, $98, by Polo Ralph Lauren / Jeans, $60, by Levi's
Food

On to the next category.

“Food for $200.”

Rocky Mountain oysters are not oysters at all, but rather this.

“They are bull balls.”

That's right.

“Bull testicles.”


T-shirt, $395, by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello / Vintage pants, stylist's own

This is where I tell you that Wall Street magnate David Tepper, the new owner of the Panthers, reportedly kept a brass statue depicting a pair of giant testicles in his hedge fund office. Tepper assumed control of the Panthers when team founder and famously dour asshole Jerry Richardson sold the team after a 2017 Sports Illustrated story outlined numerous accusations of Richardson sexually harassing his employees and paying them hush money to keep his indiscretions quiet. Oh, and using a racial slur in front of a Black scout for the team. The year before that story broke, Richardson had a statue of himself, gifted to him by the team's minority owners, installed at the entrance of his team's home stadium, because of course he did. After Tepper purchased the team, he told reporters that he was “contractually obligated to keep that statue as it is.”

Tepper abided by those terms, but only for two years. On June 10, the statue was removed from stadium grounds and put in a storage facility. I asked McCaffrey if he knew the statue was gonna get toppled, Confederate-style.

“I had no idea. They said that one of the main reasons was coronavirus. If people come, it was blocking an area of entrances.”

I'm not sure I buy that.

“That's just what we were told.”

Were you surprised when the ‘Sports Illustrated’ story about Richardson came out? Did you believe the article?

“Whether or not I believe it, I don't even know if that's important. I know Mr. Richardson was always nice to me, and there's a lot of people in Charlotte that absolutely love him. That is definitely something that you don't want to see come out.”


Boxer shorts, $45, by Paul Stuart / Socks, $15, by Entireworld / Cap, $125, from Stock Vintage
Name The Book's Author

“For $100.”

He wrote ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’

“Are there hints allowed?”

Are there hints on a football field, Christian?

“Sometimes. I know this. I don't know his last name. Will it count if I get the first name?”

Yeah, I'll count it.

“His first name's J.D.”

That's right, J.D. Salinger is correct.

“Some of these I should know. I'm upset I don't know them. ‘Sister Christian’…that one I'm mad at. I got to know that.”

In case you were unaware, Christian McCaffrey is a white running back. That's a rarity in the NFL, particularly within the upper echelons of that position. McCaffrey is all too aware of his standing, and gets asked about it a lot. More times, in fact, than about working out in quarantine. His first season in the NFL came the year after Colin Kaepernick's last. Safety Eric Reid, who joined Kap and other players in kneeling during the national anthem, was McCaffrey's teammate before he got released this March. Like many other players, McCaffrey is a professional whose primary focus is on, you know, being good at football. But as much as the NFL has tried to keep the world at bay, reality can't help but intrude.

That was very much the case in 2020, with both the pandemic and the second civil rights movement compelling the league to confront social issues in ways that, in years past, it had only paid transparent lip service to. So when Saints wideout Michael Thomas and a rogue NFL office employee created and posted a video demanding the league admit that it had failed to address systemic racism in any constructive form, McCaffrey gave the video his formal public endorsement.

“I liked the video,” he says. “I tweeted a Bible verse when I saw it. It was Matthew 11:15. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. For me, I wanted to send a message to people to listen. Because it's hard to argue with somebody's feelings. They feel that way for a reason. If you truly listen, you'll start to realize that it is bigger than you.”

Roger Goodell was forced to respond with a video of his own, admitting essentially that the league was “wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier.”

Did you like Goodell's response to that video?

“We'll have to wait and see. Actions speak louder than words. But, at the same time, addressing mistakes and addressing that there's an issue is part of reforming. That's the initial step, and that's important as well.”


The NFL

Okay, for $500: “Spider 2 Y Banana” is a play-action pass designed to hit this player in the flat.

“The Y? Depends on the formation,” says McCaffrey, leaning in closer. I've made a critical error and he's definitely noticed it. “So it's supposed to hit the guy who goes in motion on the flat, but it's a tough question, because are you asking for the X, Y, or Z?”

I'm going to give it to you no matter what, because you know more about football than I do. All I know about Spider 2 Y Banana is Jon Gruden saying it on ‘Monday Night Football.’

“My dad scored a lot of touchdowns on Spider 2 Y Banana. They usually have like a speedy guy, like a slot receiver, catch that ball.”

Does that slot receiver line up in the backfield, or does he come across in motion?

“Sometimes in the backfield, sometimes out of a little bunch formation.”

Have you ever been the Y in Spider 2 Y Banana?

“I've never been the guy, no. Usually they fake to me.”

Seems kind of like a rip-off that you don't get the ball instead.

“Anytime I don't get the ball, it's a rip-off.”

McCaffrey is eager to finish the game. He's in a groove and wants to see it through. So let's go to the SPEED ROUND.

“Name the Movie by the Quote for $100.”

“No amount of money ever bought a second of time.”

“ ‘No amount of money ever bought a second of time’? That's easy for you? Did you make the questions?”

Yes.

“I know this, I know this one. I know it's a superhero movie. Avengers.

I'm going to give that to you. It's ‘Endgame.’ That's correct.

“Let's go to Name the Book's Author for $300.”

‘Kitchen Confidential.’

“Who is Betty Crocker?”

That's incorrect. The correct answer is Anthony Bourdain.

“I was going to say Ina Garten, but…”

That would have been a good guess.

“I'm just guessing chefs. North Carolina, $200.”

Proper Carolina barbecue focuses primarily on this meat.

“My North Carolina trivia is terrible. What is brisket?”

That is incorrect. “What is pulled pork?”

“Pulled pork. All right, Piano Men, $500.…”

McCaffrey ends up getting more questions right than wrong and goes into Final Jeopardy! with a war chest of $3,500. He bets just a scant $200 on the category, which is STANFORD FOOTBAW.

He was the starting quarterback for Stanford in the infamous Stanford band game.

“My dad was in the game, I'm pretty sure,” he says, racking his brain. “Uh, I don't think he was, actually.” (He wasn't!) “Who is John Elway?”

That is correct. You get 200 more fake dollars, and you have finished with a robust $3,700. Yay. Unbelievable.

“That was money. That was perfect!” he says. “Some of those are really tough, made me think.”

Indeed they did. On some of the clues, I could see McCaffrey thinking out the answers—those moments when you know you know the answer but your brain won't fork it over. I could also see him getting a little competitive, wanting to ace each category even though he wasn't playing against anyone. Ah, but that's the heart of any good competition, isn't it? When you strip everything away—crowds, money, stakes, and even coaches—what you're left with is the game you're playing, with equal parts joy and determination, against yourself. And that game never ends. Not for Christian McCaffrey. Not for anyone.

Drew Magary is the cofounder of Defector. His latest novel, ‘Point B,’ is available now.

A version of this story originally appears in the October 2020 issue with the title "Fantasy Pick."


PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Melodie McDaniel
Styled by George Cortina
Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon using Dior Beauty
Hair by Jerrod Roberts for The Wall Group
Tailoring by Susie Kourinian
Set design by Heath Mattioli for Frank Reps
Produced by GE Projects
Special thanks to Chateau Marmont