Here's Why Michael Oher Has Hated 'The Blind Side' Forever

Michael Oher’s story is incredible. His mother, who wrestled with addictions to alcohol and crack cocaine, had 12 kids. His dad was often in prison–and eventually was killed there. 

Nonetheless, Oher blossomed into a football standout. While starring on the gridiron, Oher bounced around foster homes. That is, until a family whose kids attended his high school, the Tuohys, took him in. He became part of their family.

The beautiful story was chronicled in Michael Lewis’ 2006 book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and the 2009 movie adaptation starring Sandra Bullock, who won Best Actress for her role.

Yet this widely beloved story took an ugly turn this week. Here’s an extended look at how this saga has played out. 

Oher was hotly pursued by the country’s top college football programs and decided to attend the University of Mississippi, the Tuohys’ alma mater. 

Freeze was hired to coach Ole Miss right after Oher committed, and the NCAA thought something was fishy given Freeze’s hiring and the Tuohys’ connections to the school, but little ultimately came of the governing body’s investigation.

Oher was a star from the beginning of his SEC career and, after receiving All-American honors as a senior, he graduated with a criminal justice degree and entered the NFL Draft.

Regardless of his conditions at home, “Big Mike” was a high school football star. A 6’4”, 315-pound offensive lineman, he was named First-Team All-State while playing under his high school coach, Hugh Freeze (now head coach of Auburn).

The five-star recruit had been living with several foster families when Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, who had a son and daughter attending Oher’s school (Briarcrest), took him into their home. They made Oher part of the family and hired a tutor to help him with school, an area in which he’d struggled since bouncing around schools and sometimes repeating grades in his early years.

After working hard to get his grades up, Oher became eligible to play Division I football.

The Baltimore Ravens selected Oher with the 23rd overall pick in the 2009 NFL Draft. The Tuohys were with Oher at the draft to celebrate.

Oher was a starter for the Ravens and won a Super Bowl with the team in 2013. He then spent one season with the Titans before joining the Carolina Panthers–tasked with protecting Cam Newton’s blind side. 

Oher played well in one season in Carolina and started in that year’s Super Bowl, but he suffered a concussion early in his second season with the Panthers and was released in 2017, marking the end of his playing career.

During his time in the league, Oher often made it clear he wasn’t thrilled with how his story was depicted in the movie and felt the narrative surrounding him and the Tuohys wasn’t entirely accurate. 

At media day ahead of the 2012 Super Bowl, for example, he said he was “tired of the movie.” Then he told ESPN in 2015 that the film had hurt his career and said he didn’t “like that movie.”

“People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie,” Oher said. “They don’t really see the skills and the kind of player I am. That’s why I get downgraded so much, because of something off the field.

“This stuff, calling me a bust, people saying if I can play or not ... that has nothing to do with football. It’s something else off the field. That's why I don't like that movie.”

The average NFL fan hadn’t given Oher much thought since his retirement, but he re-entered the news cycle this month. He filed a lawsuit against Leigh Ann and Sean Tuohy, claiming that he thought they’d adopted him but instead they had led him to sign a “conservatorship”–an arrangement that allowed them to financially profit off of him.

As Oher tells it, he was misled, and the Tuohys leveraged their conservator power to receive millions in royalties from The Blind Side while Oher got nothing.

What is Oher looking for with this legal action? He wants to end the Tuohys’ conservatorship and bar them from using his name and likeness. Oh, and – most importantly, it seems – he’s seeking compensation for his share of Blind Side earnings.

Sean Tuohy said his family was devastated by the lawsuit, which asserts that the Tuohys saw in Oher “a gullible young man whose athletic talent could be exploited for their own benefit.”