The Extraordinary Negroes

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The Year of the Great Gush of Male Tears

Chicago Bears linebacker Khalil Mack isn’t a football player, he’s a force of nature.

A 6-foot-3, 247-pound battering ram who torments offensive coordinators and inflicts carnage and cataclysm on blood and bone. He’s Halley’s Comet — the ever-elusive, generational talent who crash-landed on Earth just to obliterate offensive linemen and pulverize franchise quarterbacks into heaping mounds of debris.

But despite his supernatural trajectory — a career that so far has included 40.5 career sacks, a league-leading 185.5 quarterback pressures since being the fifth overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft and becoming the first player in league history to be named first-team All-Pro at both outside linebacker and defensive end in the same year — he was traded from the Oakland Raiders to the Chicago Bears on September 2, 2018, where he immediately became the recipient of a record-breaking six-year, $141 million contract extension.

His teammates bemoaned the move publicly, and the sports world descended into complete disarray as confusion and disbelief permeated every nook and cranny of Al Gore’s Internet. The prevailing thought was the same: Who in the hell trades Khalil Mack?

Read the rest at Mel Magazine.