Sports
Georgia football’s Nazir Stackhouse and his long struggle with narcolepsy entering NFL
ATHENS, Ga. — They were the most tense, most exciting moments of the Georgia football season, arguably the most exciting in the entire college football season: an epic game against Georgia Tech that stretched to eight overtimes and well past midnight. And as Nazir Stackhouse stood on the sideline, he was fighting an internal battle.
Stay awake, he kept telling himself. Somebody score and end this. Stay awake. Don’t fall asleep.
That’s what happened a few years before at Tennessee. The Georgia offense was on a long drive, and Stackhouse, a nose tackle, was on the bench with the rest of the defensive linemen.
“I’m on the bench fighting sleep, fighting it,” Stackhouse said.
Then, like it so often happens, bam. He was out.
Stackhouse was diagnosed with narcolepsy during his first year at Georgia. During his career, he started 42 games and won two national championships. Now he’s an NFL draft prospect, while still dealing with the condition on an everyday — or every minute — basis.
For one thing, Stackhouse rarely drives. He has a license but always has someone in the car with him and keeps the drives short. He never falls asleep when he’s on the field during game action, whether it be a game or practice. He did fall asleep during meetings, but coaches would work with him; Kirby Smart was known to lean over to tap Stackhouse: “Right, Nazir? Right?”
Former Georgia defensive lineman Nazir Stackhouse has been projected from the fourth to the seventh round in the 2025 NFL Draft. (Kirby Lee / Imagn Images)
“Yeah, yeah, coach,” Stackhouse would reply, jolted back awake.
“More than once,” Smart said with a chuckle. “It was real. I’ve never seen a guy on the sideline in the game go out.”
Smart mimicked going to sleep.
“But he’s a great kid,” Smart said. “Once they got it under control, it was not a big deal. … It never affected his performance.”
NFL people, who tend to project Stackhouse anywhere from the fourth to the seventh round, don’t appear to think the narcolepsy is an issue. One area scout said that it “sounds like he has a handle on it, so I wouldn’t call it a red flag or anything.”
“It’s a new one for me,” a second area scout said. “Haven’t had this pop up with a player before. The coaches say it isn’t an issue.”
Stackhouse talks about the condition freely, how suddenly it hits, and can’t help but laugh at some of those times. He once slept while on a treadmill. He felt it coming on, so he grabbed the handrails, then the next thing he knew he woke back up.
“And I’m like, ‘Damn, how long was I out?’ I look down. I was down there for like 12 minutes,” Stackhouse said.
Narcolepsy symptoms usually begin between the ages of 7 and 25 and often are misdiagnosed, according to the National Institutes of Health. The exact cause is unknown, there is no cure, and the condition will be lifelong. It is a rare condition, estimated to be found in about .002 percent of the U.S. population. But some of the symptoms can be managed with a combination of medications and lifestyle changes, according to the NIH.
That Stackhouse is an athlete helps. The NIH says daily exercise of at least 20 minutes improves nighttime sleep quality and reduces “excessive daytime sleepiness.” Eating healthy helps too, so access to Georgia’s training table during the past few years has been beneficial.
Stackhouse dealt with it long before college. Growing up in Stone Mountain, Ga., he fell asleep in class. His mother started taking him to sleep studies when he was 11. The family didn’t think it was much of a problem at first. Then, as he got older, the problem didn’t go away, but it was too expensive to get an official diagnosis or even treatment. When he got to Georgia, his mother asked the medical staff to test her son, and the narcolepsy was confirmed.
Georgia put him in touch with a pulmonary doctor in Athens, and Stackhouse took a medication, WAKIX, for about a year but stopped because it gave him headaches. Stackhouse is looking at other possible medications, but otherwise just has years of knowing how to manage it on his own. If he feels sleep coming on, he moves around, if he can, or takes precautions, like the time on the treadmill.
“It never affected me on the field,” he said. “It was if I was stationary, comfortable. That’s where it hits.”
On the field, Stackhouse seemed unaffected. He played as a reserve on Georgia’s 2020 and 2021 teams, which had a remarkable collection of defensive line talent, including nose tackle Jordan Davis and defensive tackle Jalen Carter. When Davis left after the 2021 season, Stackhouse took his starting job. He had three tackles and a hurry of C.J. Stroud in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff and a tackle for loss in the national championship game.
Off the field, Stackhouse dealt with narcolepsy, often during games. When a game was in hand, and the starters were pulled, Stackhouse would head into a tent on the sideline and fall asleep.
“It definitely didn’t affect my playing,” he said. “But say we were playing one of those, I don’t know, I would say under-talented teams. I’d play one or two quarters. After that, I’m on the sideline. We had a tent, and I would literally sit down and watch the guys play. And I’d fall asleep.”
But he did not during the epic eight-overtime win over Georgia Tech. In fact, Stackhouse fought it off so well that when he got home, he actually couldn’t get to sleep for three more hours.
“Narcolepsy is so unpredictable,” Stackhouse said. “Because people are like, ‘Are you tired, are you tired?’ No, I’m not tired, I just fell asleep. I dozed off. It’s like a curse.”
Dane Brugler contributed to this story.
(Top photo: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
At the end of a week when the true impact of Hollywood coming to Wrexham was laid bare by a balance sheet containing almost as many new records as music store HMV, it felt appropriate that the Welsh club should make the long trip to Exeter City.
The Devon club are in their 21st season of fan ownership, the same model that kept Wrexham afloat for more than a decade before Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney rode into town.
Like Saturday’s 2-0 victors, Exeter had a stint in the National League — five years in their case, between 2003 and 2008 — after being taken to the brink of financial ruin by previous owners.
Today, though, the Devon club is rightly considered one of the best-run in the EFL, making the most of limited resources to establish themselves as a League One outfit. Wrexham manager Phil Parkinson is certainly a fan.
“This is a good club and it’s total respect over the job they’ve done,” he says. “I love their story with the fan-owned situation and how, like ourselves, this club has had tough times but kept themselves going.”
Exeter’s mid-table standing these past three years is no mean feat in a division that has seen them go up against some relative behemoths, with Birmingham City the latest member of the Premier League alumni to visit St James Park after Sheffield Wednesday, Derby County, Ipswich Town and Portsmouth had all made the trip to the south west.
Wrexham may never have played higher than the second tier in their history, but this week’s revelation about the huge £26.7million turnover generated by last season’s League Two promotion at the STōK Cae Ras means they can be added to any list of League One clubs with exceptional financial muscle.
To put that figure — which is likely to have risen slightly for the current campaign — into context, Portsmouth, champions of this division in 2023-24, raked in £13.6m over the same financial period and runners-up Derby £19.4m.
Exeter’s accounts for the last full financial year are not yet available, but in 2022-23, annual turnover at St James Park stood at £5.8m, including £1.39m in transfer revenue. A profit of £312,000 was made in a season when the club finished 14th in League One.
Such prudency, and in particular the nurturing of young talent to sell on for profit, has characterised this era of fan ownership at St James Park. In the absence of a major benefactor, it has had to.
Sell-on clauses are particularly important, providing Exeter with timely windfalls on top of the initial fees paid for the likes of Ollie Watkins and Ethan Ampadu, sold to Brentford and Chelsea respectively in 2017.
Just two summers ago, Ampadu’s switch from Stamford Bridge to Leeds United earned his boyhood club more than £1m. Jay Stansfield’s move from Fulham to Birmingham City also proved lucrative, with the sell-on clause in his 2019 transfer to Craven Cottage expected to bring in a further £2m.
Not so long ago, a similar level of husbandry seemed to be Wrexham’s only hope of a brighter future after years of mismanagement and poor decision-making had culminated in the fans riding to the rescue in 2011.
For the next decade, the supporters’ trust ran the show with the backing of around 4,000 members paying their annual subs.
On-field success proved just out of reach, Wrexham bagging 98 points in 2011-12, only to be pipped to the Conference title by Fleetwood Town and then losing to Newport County 12 months later in the play-off final. The irony of Fleetwood and, to a lesser extent, Newport both benefiting from a rich backer was lost on no one.
Off the field, however, the trust transformed a club initially losing £750,000 per year to one that was debt-free and had cash in the bank when bought by Reynolds and McElhenney in February 2021.
Once Hollywood had arrived in north Wales, spending restraints went out of the window as the new owners attempted to turbo-charge an escape from non-League via a series of loans.
This ambition remained once back in the EFL, albeit — as the latest set of accounts reveal — with Wrexham now being run along more sustainable lines.
An £11m wage bill in 2023-24 may be beyond the comprehension of not only last year’s League Two clubs, but also most of Wrexham’s divisional peers this time around.
Sealing the win from the spot 👏
🔴⚪️ #WxmAFC pic.twitter.com/QpMqN85reC
— Wrexham AFC (@Wrexham_AFC) March 29, 2025
But it was made possible by that record-breaking turnover of £26.7m, raised in part by a seven-fold increase in sponsorship income to £13.1m, plus other substantial boosts to matchday and retail receipts.
This new-found sustainability on the back of such huge income levels also brings one very big benefit. Namely, how Wrexham — unlike others in League One, whose business model relies largely on selling players — can hang on to their best talent with a view to pushing even further up the leagues.
The performances of Max Cleworth and Arthur Okonkwo at this level have not gone unnoticed. The duo being calmness personified in the comfortable win over Gary Caldwell’s side will only have sharpened that interest.
Likewise how Sam Smith, Ollie Rathbone (who scored the game’s opener on Saturday), Ryan Longman, Lewis Brunt and George Dobson — all signed in the past 12 months amid a notable shift in recruitment policy that has started to bring the average age down and give the side more mobility — once again underlined their contribution to the promotion push.
The vast financial resources that have allowed Parkinson to recruit such talent mean there’s no real ceiling to how far the Welsh club can go. Unlike, perhaps, Exeter, due to the limitations of a fan-run setup that inevitably go with the commendable aspects, which on Saturday included a team of volunteers clearing rubbish from the stands within 15 minutes of the final whistle.
Wrexham are not fully there on the sustainability front. They did lose £2.7m in 2023-24 and a similar deficit is forecast for this season.
But, after all those years in north Wales of trying to make every pound do the work of a fiver as the supporters’ trust commendably kept the lights on, the time really has arrived for Wrexham to dream big.
(Top photo: Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)
Paige Spiranac is one of the biggest influencers in sports on social media, building a following of more than 4 million followers on Instagram and another 1.6 million on TikTok.
As Spiranac grew in popularity from playing collegiate golf to taking a different route in the sports industry, she faced some vile rumors about how she was able to get ahead.
Paige Spiranac attends the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Release and 60th Anniversary Celebration on May 16, 2024, in New York City. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit)
She revealed on an episode of the “Quiet Please!” podcast earlier this month that she just “wanted to be liked” when she made an appearance at a 2015 golf tournament in Dubai.
“There were constant comments like ‘I did sexual favors to get this invite,’ and I was listening to it – and they would say [it] within earshots of me,” Spiranac revealed. “It was tough.”
Spiranac added that her popularity was a result of “going viral” but she wasn’t prepared for everything that came with it.
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Paige Spiranac watches her teammates putt during the Kaulig Companies Championship Pro-Am at Firestone Country Club, July 12, 2023, in Akron, Ohio. (Jeff Lange/USA Today Network)
“I ended up going viral and this was back when people weren’t going viral all the time and I didn’t know how to handle it and my whole life got flipped upside down. I went from having 500 followers to 100,000 followers,” Spiranac said, via People magazine. “I show up and was doing hours of press, which I wasn’t prepared for.
“I had no training to do this. And I would say there were a couple of girls who were really supportive and who were nice, but the majority [of them], it was brutal. I would go on the range and girls would just scatter. No one wanted to hit next to me.”
Paige Spiranac attends the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Celebration on May 18, 2024, in Hollywood, Florida. (Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit)
Spiranac has been open about how she deals with struggles on and off the golf course, as well as trying to get on the LPGA Tour in the past.
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Nick Garcia is like a horse whisperer, but for shotputters. He’s trained 18 Southern Section champions at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High in the shotput and discus. When he speaks, athletes listen.
Lawrence Kensinger, a junior at Venice, started working out with Garcia once a week. He trusts him so much that he adopted his weight-training regimen and shotputting techniques. More challenging was accepting Garcia’s edict that he’d have to wait until the final two weeks of the track season to reach peak form.
That means when others might be throwing top marks, he will have to bite his tongue, be patient and wait for the City Section championships and state championships to do his best.
“It’s for sure something you think about,” Kensinger said of having to wait to see the validation of his workouts. “I’ve focused on enjoying the process and being patient. When the time comes, I will throw far.”
Garcia believes Kensinger has a 60-foot throw coming this season. His best had been 55 feet 5.5 inches going into this weekend. All the training revolves around reaching peak form when it counts.
“That’s the plan,” Garcia said. “And he will. He’s going to have a big throw soon. You can’t throw far every week. If you don’t plan for the end of the season, someone else will. You want to make sure you’re locked in for the end of the season.”
Kensinger comes from a family of achievers. His brother, Thomas, was a star football player at Venice, went to the Air Force Academy, gave up the sport, became a boxer and recently won the academy’s heavyweight title. Sister Daniella is a beach volleyball player at Arizona State after being the City Section player of the year at Venice.
Twins Daniella and Thomas Kensinger were star athletes at Venice High.
(Cliff Kensinger)
Lawrence, 5 feet 11 and 210 pounds, played football his first two years at Venice before dropping the sport last season to focus on the shotput. “I started to love it,” he said.
What’s to love about heaving a 12-pound ball of iron?
It’s the journey to win meets.
“It’s a mix of everything — technique, explosiveness, patience,” Kensinger said. “If you try to do brute force, it’s going going to throw you off.”
Now that his big brother is boxing, will Lawrence test himself?
“I’ve been provoking him a little bit,” he said. “I’ve been telling him to teach me how to box.”
Lawrence still lifts weights with the football team, then heads to the track to train by himself. He’s an A student preparing to be the City Section shotput champion, then maybe surprise people at the state meet in Fresno.
He’s got his shotput Yoda instructing him, so who knows.
Venice has one of its strongest City Section track teams, with distance standout Paul Tranquilla and 400-meter runner Nathaniel Santa Cruz ready to score points in multiple events.
Remember, Kensinger is only a junior and sticking with Plan A.
“It’s all about those two weeks, the City championships and the state meet,” he said.
He’s a 17-year-old committed to the process of preparation and execution while waiting for the big day to happen.
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