This story is part of Sports Illustrated’s 2025 Power List, honoring the 50 most influential figures in sports right now. Read more in the October issue and check out who made this year’s Power Couples, Power Siblings and the Next Generation.
When Jayden Daniels was a little kid, he’d get invited to sleepovers at friends’ houses and the evening would follow a familiar script. His mom, Regina Jackson, remembers always getting her momentary respite interrupted by a phone call to pick him up before bedtime, with the additional request that everyone at the sleepover come stay at his house instead.
“They just wanted to be at home,” Jackson says now of her kids (Jayden’s sister, Bianca, is a year older). “They were comfortable.”
She tells this story to back up a central point: Jayden, now 24, was—and still very much is—a homebody. This is further evidenced by the fact that, outside of the upsizing of his bed, his childhood bedroom in San Bernardino, Calif., remains largely untouched. Laying around are letters of interest from colleges all over the country. Old cleats that don’t fit anymore. Ribbons from track and field meets. Conference awards from his days at LSU. The plain piece of paper hanging over the doorframe on which Daniels wrote—and rewrote—about his intention to play in the NFL.
A lucent 2024 validated that ambition. Daniels followed a Heisman Trophy win as LSU’s quarterback in December 2023 by gifting the Washington football franchise its best season since the Gulf War (Daniels was born nine years after the Commanders last posted more than 10 wins in a season). He starred in what was arguably the signature moment of the season—a Week 8 Hail Mary against the Bears that, even by Hail Mary standards, took on a deeply religious meaning with the way it sent tens of thousands of people into delirious rapture and put his club on a path toward the playoffs. His next act was quarterbacking a 45–31 divisional-round win over the Lions in one of the biggest postseason upsets of the last decade.
He won the AP Offensive Rookie of the Year award. He finished seventh in MVP voting, just behind Patrick Mahomes. He made the Pro Bowl. And perhaps the biggest headline for someone who prefers being at home: He boarded a flight to Paris this offseason and toured France for a few days, meeting up with the football club Paris Saint-Germain.
“That was my first time out of the country,” he says in August, just a few minutes before driving into the Commanders’ practice facility for some off-day work. “Long flight from California all the way to Paris.”
While he has remained remarkably in the moment, he has clearly had time to consider how he wants his life to go from here. Calling it a star rise is a bit of a misnomer because the creation of an actual star is bound by science. We can quantify and understand what leads to the final radiant burst of energy.
But in the NFL, the entire star-making enterprise can feel like riding alongside a New York City delivery cyclist weaving through the streets of the Upper West Side. There is a moment each year when a player seems to become less himself and more a product of the NFL’s all-possessing, all-encompassing algorithm of content. That moment does not always feel conscious or even consented to. At the very least, it can be disorienting.
When asked about his own concept of personal power heading into his second NFL season, though, Daniels’s response is both incredibly thoughtful and ambitious.
“I would just say the concept of power is more so just being able to control your own narrative,” he says. “And really do what you want to do and tell your story.”
This is another reason why the story of Jayden as a young kid and the comfort he felt at home is important because, in his quest to do the NFL his own way—in maybe the greatest flex of his personal power—he made the decision to have his mother become an instrumental part of the process. Regina is not just his mom, after all, but an NFLPA-certified agent who co-represents Daniels with Ron Butler of Agency 1 Sports. She is also the cofounder of a collective called Athletes In Control, which, she says, has 10 current clients who have sought guidance in the nebulous world of NIL and the spillover into professional football. She was also on the trip to Paris.
It makes sense that the person Daniels has helping protect his narrative is the one who understands him better than anyone else. Jackson is by far the highest-profile example of a parent taking on an official, licensed role in their child’s business and on-field interests in NFL history. (Felicia Jones, the mother of Lamar Jackson, is famously the Ravens quarterback’s most trusted consigliere but is not an NFLPA-certified agent, which prevents her from having active contact with an NFL team.) If this all goes the way the family is expecting, she will not be the last.
“This is a life that chose us …” Regina is talking about how the family arrived here. The past year has been both surprising and unsurprising. When anyone tries to challenge an orthodoxy there is pushback, even if those people feel they did not really have a choice. This would seem, in the NFL, to be especially true for a woman and a mother trying to cross the cement barrier into a negotiation room that may one day contain the best football player in the world. Jackson has made candid appearances on podcasts and docuseries, with most of what she’s said being subject to the typical internet shredder, such as her thoughts on why she feels protective over Jayden in his dating life. However, she has always been backed by the endorsement of her son, who once told the Boardroom podcast that “nothing gets past my mama. She reads people, she doesn’t want to put people around me that she doesn’t feel will benefit me.”
Says Daniels, “My mom is an agent. I have an agent, Ron Butler, but my mom is a big part of the team. She was going to be a big part regardless, because that’s my mom and my family in general.” His father, Javon Daniels, who played football at Washington and Iowa State, has also been instrumental in shaping his burgeoning career. And Jayden also talks about his reverence for his grandparents. “The people close to me, they know who I am, they know how I operate,” he says. “So why not have somebody [around] that has known me for 24 years of my life and knows what I can do and just have honest conversations with [them]? And then obviously their opinions matter a lot.”
Jackson has opinions, too. But she wants to make one thing clear, especially after being so visible in Jayden’s journey through the perilous world of NIL and now his NFL career. “I don’t want the spotlight,” she says. “I hate it, to be honest with you. But I know that’s what comes with it. And there is some good that I can share there to get my story out, because I do want to influence women—and not just women, but mothers and fathers that maybe thought they could do it or maybe don’t want to. But we have to still be those instillers of life lessons in these kids.
“There’s a lot of things that have happened in this world that we’re so taken aback by. How did this happen? Why is this happening? ... I think we need to be that pillar [by] asking our kids more stuff. We’re in a generation [where] these kids don’t speak, they don’t talk. So we have to be those parents to say, Are you good? And then we can’t just say, O.K, they’re good. We have to be like, No, let’s talk this through. What’s going on?”
Regina has an undergraduate degree in business administration and two master’s, one in public health administration and the other with a focus on entrepreneurship—a path she started on when Jayden was very young. She says she would take 20 units per quarter out of a desire to “level up” for her kids, while still taking them out for Dippin’ Dots after track practice. She served as the treasurer and president of Jayden’s Pop Warner team.
She found her background useful when, all of a sudden, she started working on a marketing agreement with a car dealership for Jayden when he was in college at Arizona State. (Daniels spent three seasons there before transferring to LSU.) Then came setting up Jayden’s LLC. Making sure his entity structures were correct. Aligning his bank accounts. From there, it felt like a matter of personal responsibility to further her education when the lawlessness of payment for college athletes kept everyone up at night.
Lately, her time has been spent collaborating on the Jayden Daniels Foundation, which orchestrated a back-to-school giveaway in San Bernardino in July. But in a larger sense, Jackson is essential in Daniels’s orbit because she can understand him in a way others cannot, knowing when to push him toward certain opportunities even if he may not feel like it in the moment.
“She can pick up on little things. There’s times where I might have to kick people out and just have a conversation with her,” Daniels says. “Like, Hey, let’s try to wrap this thing up as fast as possible. I’m tired. For sure, there’s times where we kind of butt heads if she has to ask me to do some stuff that I don’t want to do. She always has my best interests at heart.”
It’s a choice that—because of NIL—is now present in the lives of parents who fear becoming the victim of a predatory scheme. Faux agents posing as players without their permission. Getting charged 20% on deals. Finding themselves, like the family of quarterback Nico Iamaleava, losing the most high-profile game of contractual chicken in the NIL era after painfully misunderstanding his market. (Now at UCLA, Iamaleava tried to rework his NIL deal at Tennessee, which cost him his starting job with the Vols.) All of it represents a kind of simultaneous pull to take charge and protect the kid, and push away, fearing that getting involved amounts to some sort of malpractice.
Back in 2022, Regina told Jayden, “One day I’m going to represent you.” In September 2024, she was officially notified that she passed the NFLPA agent certification exam. Jackson says she now gets compared to the character Tasha Mack from The Game, a TV show about a mother of a superstar quarterback who starts her own management firm.
The development has Daniels in a position where the hermit in him—the one who would like control over his narrative and keep everything in neat little buckets—gets challenged a bit. His ultimate preference would be that every football-adjacent conversation remain strictly about football (“I like to really just be low-key and stay out the way and keep people guessing of my next move,” he says). He generally dislikes talking about his personal life, which includes discussions about his mom.
“As I grew up, more people became more accustomed to knowing who my family was, my mom and my dad and stuff like that—they’re very curious,” Jayden says. “And obviously now my mom’s a certified agent, so they want to ask me these questions, and I try to not really talk about her that much because at the end of the day, she’s my mom.
“I wanted to keep that private and make sure she’s always straight with people trying to come after me and wanting to see me fail or see me succeed, and they might go after her. So I don’t really try to talk about her that much.”
His instinct to protect is more obvious behind the scenes, Regina says, leading to a strange parenthood moment as he has begun repeating aphorisms to her that she once used to soothe and motivate him. If there is some unnecessary criticism, an inappropriate comment on social media or some invasive moment, he steps in.
“I have to tell Jayden that you can’t fight all your mom’s battles because your voice is very powerful,” she says. “We have to be able to pick and choose when we use that voice.”
The refrain?
“Mom, we don’t fold. We don’t back down.”
On draft night this year, Kimberly Williams was surrounded by charts, ones with team rosters and others with the best players at each of the positions at which any of her prospective NFL clients was playing. Around her were several assistants who were responsible for updating one of said charts, and nearly everyone was manning one of five different cellphones used to contact NFL general managers and scouts.
Williams has been an NFLPA-certified agent since 2023, having gone through the preparation process with Jackson. One of the players she was fielding information about that night in April was her son, Josh, a running back from LSU who would sign as an undrafted free agent with the Buccaneers.
Josh is also her client, which meant that she eventually found out he was signing with Tampa Bay before he did. “I definitely shed some tears and definitely was a mom in that perspective,” she says. “Definitely happy tears.”
Williams’s husband, Jermaine Williams, played running back in the NFL from 1998 to 2001, and his post-career journey sharpened Kimberly’s adeptness at combing through endless amounts of dense paperwork. Credits to go back to school. Health insurance reimbursements. An HSA plan. An NFL-sponsored 401(k) plan. Disability. Annuities. Throughout their lives, there were so many documents to sign, and she always found herself taking a moment to say, “Let’s actually read what this says.”
She’s worked on government contracts and is also a successful real estate broker, the kind of person who will dive into a deal and expose a family member taking advantage of an elderly relative—something she’s actually done.
So one afternoon back in 2023, with the rest of her family away on a trip, Williams hopped on an NFLPA call and collected the requisite study material to begin a short prep session for her entrance exam. She took the test on a Monday, having told no one, and two months later found out she was certified. She simply dropped a screenshot of the acceptance letter into the family group chat.
“Everybody was like, Wait a minute, what?” she says, laughing. “Call us?”
She had no intention of representing Josh but through word of mouth had already amassed a small stable of clients while her son was still in college. According to NFLPA records, Williams has negotiated five NFL contracts (NFLPA agents must negotiate at least one deal in their first three years of certification in order to maintain active status). She also represents clients in both the Canadian Football League and the United Football League.
Her advantage, Williams says, is her status as a mother. She can relate to parents in meetings differently, talking nostalgically about the journey from the perspective of someone who has seen her own kid swallowed up by gigantic football pads in Pop Warner now preparing for a life of professional football. Along with Jackson and Heather Van Norman—the mother of three-time Pro Bowler Odell Beckham Jr.—the group makes up a small but expanding pool of prospective agents who are hoping to normalize the transition and empower others to do the same. Both Jackson and Williams say they have received numerous calls and direct messages from parents inquiring about the process.
“I think that it makes us elite in some sense because we could just basically get eye to eye with these parents,” Williams says.
Van Norman, who views her role as part of a budding cottage industry of educated family members who can holistically care for the player’s well being as well as their business interests, said: “We’re not going to lose the No. 1 hat we have, which is being a mom. Sometimes, O will call me and say ‘I just want to talk to my mom today.’ And we’ve learned that this is the important thing. Sometimes it’s just being a mom, but having an oversight of what’s going on—you have to have one person in your clan, whether it’s aunt, uncle, someone who isn’t in the pockets of our young men who want to nurture and guide them. There’s hard discussions that need to be had.”
As Williams was interviewing possible agents for her son, she heard conflicting ideas and, at times, struggled to get responses back. Her sense, after gaining her certification, was that some agents don’t care about players who are not potential early-round picks. They are not worth all the granular work that goes into ensuring that every minute need is met.
And, for Williams, that meant keeping up with Josh’s physical therapy and training through the predraft process, securing transportation to rookie minicamps, getting him back home from break, ordering food, coordinating laundry, making sure he had the correct accommodations and, most importantly, checking in on his mental health the way only a mother could, scanning for those moments imperceptible to others where a red flag may go off.
In this way, Williams, Jackson and Daniels sound particularly aligned. By taking on an active role, according to both mothers, their children have the ability to be more of their authentic selves—exactly what Jayden himself hopes for in the coming months and years of his career. It’s less about control, the way they explain it, and more about filtering out the invasive, the toothiness of the business side that would bring them back to their childhood home as anything but the person who left.
And that is something that tends to make parents in this position more relentless. “[Coaches and GMs] look at us as just a mom,” says Williams, “but they don’t realize that we are the ones that they should be worried about.”
Jayden says that Regina still calls him every day if he doesn’t check in first. She gives him space—Jayden says they do not see each other much during the offseason—but there will still be times when he slips off into a nap and wakes up to five notifications.
“I’ll always call back,” he says.
That dynamic is something that other people within the game might not understand. Ask active NFL agents who are not also parents of NFL players and they will likely say that the idea of representing a child is too personal and could lead to emotional mistakes. They will bring up someone like Deion Sanders, whose predraft hubris and advice likely cost his son, Shedeur, a few rounds.
Ask parents of nonprofessional athletes and they might say that such involvement in a kid’s career could impede their process of becoming independent. That everyone must struggle and must experience the worst of the world for themselves.
Ask parents of athletes who have been hoodwinked by NIL collectives, coaches, agents, other parents—basically, anyone—and the response would be entirely different. The idea of turning over a child, yet again, to someone or something that they are not 100% sure is functioning in their best interest is beyond unconscionable. The life of a sports parent is, after all, the art of holding on until the very moment when letting go is an obvious necessity.
Like a splatter painting, it’s messy and interpreting it is completely dependent on personal experience. On perspective. On personal psyche and makeup. On true goals, expressed or otherwise.
In the case of Jayden and Regina, power comes from being so successful that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. That type of power can be shared and familiar. It can change the way the framework looks, if that’s what Daniels ultimately wants, because who is really going to tell the man saving football in D.C. anything different?
Power becomes turning to look at everything else changing faster than one thinks is possible, and still getting that feeling of walking into the childhood bedroom where you were once—and maybe always will be—comfortable.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jayden Daniels Is Making Commanders Football Fun Again—and Doing It His Own Way.
