The Biggest Mystery of the NFL Offseason is….Sauce Gardner’s Age???

The biggest mystery of the NFL offseason, the show only half-joked, is how old Sauce Gardner actually is. The Colts cornerback and former Jet swears he's 24. Every website says 25. Nobody can explain the gap.

Gardner addressed it with a laugh, repeating "I'm 24" and offering to produce his passport and driver's license. He was genuinely agitated to learn he's listed a year older in Madden, too. James Boyd of The Athletic did a deep dive, tracing the discrepancy through Pro Football Reference and ESPN.com back to a Cincinnati site, and found nobody could say where the older age originated.

It's not a new phenomenon. The show pointed to Buddy Hield, who publicly threw a 26th birthday party while the Kings and the NBA had him listed at 25. His response when asked: that's their fault, not mine.

The room split on who to believe, with a few Danny Almonte jokes thrown in, but the more compelling explanation came from the broadcast-veteran perspective. Lots of college athletic-department sites, run by the same sports information directors who compile official stats and game notes, simply don't list players' birth dates. So when NFL teams prepare for the combine, there's often a genuine question of how old a prospect is, and the research staff has to dig before everyone gets a packet with the real dates. Whether the league checks birth certificates at the medical exam is doubtful, the thinking went, because they probably don't care enough to.

The consensus landed on a mix-up rather than a lie, likely something stale from an old college website. As for why an established player on his second contract would fib about his age anyway, the show couldn't come up with a reason. Either way, it doesn't really matter, and Sauce Gardner clearly finds the whole thing funny.