Trooper Taylor

And by the end of 2022, Jade was preparing for what she believed would be the biggest and most exciting change of her life, becoming a mother.

Now, the father of Jade's unborn child was Blaze Taylor.

a highly accomplished former college football player who was working as a scout for the Tennessee Titans.

Jade and Blaze had met on Hinge, and their relationship had been complicated, almost from the beginning.

It's my favorite.

And so Nyjah might have said something at that point, like, you know, if you make it, I might stop over.

But I think Jade just really wanted her best friend to finally meet the father of her child, right?

I was going to say, is it possible that...

It was the family business and a way of life.

His father is Trooper Taylor.

Trooper Taylor had played defensive back at Baylor, where he met his wife, Evelyn, who was also a star athlete running track at Baylor.

And later she earned her Ph.D. in psychology and became Dr. Evelyn Taylor.

So Trooper and Evie got married in 1993 on the football field at Baylor's Floyd Casey Stadium, which kind of gives you an indication of how deeply football would become woven into the Taylor family identity.

After college, Trooper Taylor became a college football coach for Baylor, then Tulane, then Tennessee, Oklahoma State, Auburn, Arkansas, Duke, and eventually Texas A&M.

Now, I don't know a lot about college football.

I'm a basketball girl.

... wide receiver coaches are always doing different things.

You remember Trooper Taylor was big on the tennis balls.

Tennis balls out of the jug machine, too.

Yeah.

But there's no doubt the football team that they would put out there was competitive as hell.

damn good job with the defense so we were always kind of battling back and forth but that was kind of my first introduction to the 12th man and I'm sitting here actually fanning a little bit like you know in the stadium like oh my goodness I'm like okay like I'm at a big time place and I've been in Baton Rouge at night I've been to Tennessee like but I'm like this environment is just it's different so I got a chance to kind of light the fuse there so my connection here was Trooper Taylor who actually coached me as a freshman in college at New Mexico So I wound up calling him, just talking about some stuff.

And he was like, hey, you know what? We probably looking for a guy, man.

You should think about this.