Charitable Gift Giving

The NFL has gotten a lot of flak lately. Seems that every time you read about football in the media, they’re not talking about the game, but about distractions like why a team name is supposedly offensive or how the criminal behavior of certain players supposedly represent the entire league.

Here’s a nice story to come out of the NFL.

On June 2, defensive tackle Devon Still learned his four year old daughter had Stage 4 pediatric cancer and given a 50% chance of survival. Soon after, he was cut from the roster of the Bengals, a devastating blow for any aspiring football player. That’s a lot of trauma for a 25 year-old man to go through. And of course, little 4 year-old Leah had to go through surgery to remove her tumor, her lymph nodes, and her right adrenal gland.

The Bengals decided to put Still’s jerseys on sale for $100 each, with 100% of the proceeds (not just the profits) of the jerseys, up to the first 10,000 going to Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center, meaning that the team would absorb about $500,000 in the cost of the jersey itself. Any sales over 10,000 jerseys and the profits would continue to go to the hospital. They’ll be continuing this sale until Monday, October 20.

On November 6 during Thursday Night Football, the Bengals will present the check, which will likely exceed $1 million, to the hospital.

Want to get in on the action? You can visit the Bengal’s Pro Shop to order your own jersey. While Still will probably never be an NFL star on the order of a Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, let’s hope his jersey sells more than any of them for the next few weeks.