USC football's Jake Olson is a long snapper. He's also blind, having lost his sight from cancer at age 12. He and the nearly seven million people nationwide with a visual disability likely see the Bird Box Challenge that's sweeping the nation as a standard Tuesday. Still, it was pretty cool to see Olson easily snap a football wearing a blindfold:
But Olson has been doing the long snap routine for a while now. He's even performed it in a live football game.Â
Olsen's path to a football field outpaces any sort of Bird Box challenge we can dream up. The guy's a blind long snapper at a major college football program. We can see just fine, and there's no way in hell we can keep a straight spiral when snapping a football. Throwing in some gigantic defenders looking for blood makes it all the more impressive.
The Bird Box challenge, which involves trying to do things while wearing a blindfold, has taken the country by storm, much to the dismay of Netflix. It's become such a phenomenon that it even permeated last night's game against the Warriors and the Rockets.Â
But if you're contemplating doing the Bird Box challenge, remember Jake Olson and the over seven million other Americans who live it on a daily basis. And thank goodness people like Olson still exist in this country because otherwise we'd be so screwed. (This post was written without a blindfold.)
