Steve Schneider

The guy who kept Shaq and Charles Barkley in line on TV for 37 years used to spend his mornings shaving and dressing his son, who could barely move and breathed through a ventilator. Then he'd go to work and laugh with those guys all night like nothing was going on. Tonight Ernie Johnson said this season will be his last, and Barkley tried to thank him on air and couldn't get the words out. I don't think most people watching that clip know what Ernie was carrying all those years. He and his wife Cheryl adopted Michael from an orphanage outside Bucharest in 1991, when he was 3. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and doctors didn't think he'd make it to his 20s. He lived to 33. When Ernie was home, getting Michael ready in the morning could take an hour and a half, and Ernie did the showering and shaving and dressing himself. In 2006 he told viewers he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and by the end of October he was back at the desk while he was still going through chemo. When Michael died in 2021, Ernie wasn't on the show that week, and Shaq, Kenny and Chuck spent about six minutes trying to hold it together while they talked about a kid most of America never met. Then last year he had heart bypass surgery, and this summer he turned 70. Ernie's dad pitched in the big leagues and then called Braves games for decades, and he gave his son a rule Ernie's talked about forever: if somebody spikes you at second base, never rub. If you've ever wondered why nobody's been able to copy Inside, that rule is a big part of it. Barkley could say the dumbest thing imaginable, Shaq could fall out of his chair, Kenny could go running to the big board, and Ernie would just pick it up and bring it back to basketball with that yellow legal pad. Those three got to be chaos because the guy in the middle never made his own stuff the show. He still calls hosting a "get-to job," and he was calling it that the same year he buried his son. So when Charles Barkley, who's roasted pretty much everybody alive on live TV, can't finish a sentence to the man, that's why.

Christian McCaffrey's grandpa was the fastest man on Earth, and at the 1960 Olympics he was quietly helping the CIA try to flip a Soviet athlete. That's the family tree behind this jersey swap, and the rest of it is even better. His name was Dave Sime. He showed up at Duke on a baseball scholarship as a premed kid, taught himself to sprint by reading every track book in the library, and in 1956 he tied the world record in the 100-yard dash. Sports Illustrated called him the world's fastest human and put him on the cover. At the Rome Olympics he lost the 100 meters in a photo finish and took silver. On that same trip he was working on getting a Soviet long jumper to defect. Pro baseball teams wanted him and the Detroit Lions drafted him, but he went to med school and spent his career in Miami doing more than 10,000 eye surgeries. Then his youngest daughter Lisa went to Stanford to play soccer and fell for a wide receiver named Ed McCaffrey. Ed played 13 years in the NFL and won three Super Bowls, the first one with the 49ers. Ed and Lisa had four boys, and all four played big-time college football. Max played receiver at Duke, the same school where his grandpa set records. Christian was the Heisman runner-up at Stanford. Dylan played QB at Michigan. Luke, the youngest, was a quarterback at Nebraska who transferred to Rice, switched to receiver, and got drafted 100th overall in 2024. Three of them made the NFL. Christian had played with or against every brother except Luke, which is why he said going into Monday that this game would complete the cycle. Luke has one thing on his famous brother too. He ran a 4.47 forty at the 2024 combine, and Christian ran a 4.48 back in 2017. So the fastest McCaffrey brother, by one hundredth of a second, is the kid who spent most of college playing quarterback. The 49ers won 23-17 and Christian punched in two touchdowns. After the whistle Luke was already out of his Commanders jersey while Christian pulled off the one with the captain's C. The man who said no to the Lions ended up grandpa to three NFL players. He died in January 2016, before any of them had played a down.