Kelly Cook was tossing a football with Mark Andrews, but something with Andrews seemed off.
“Mark, what’s going on?” asked Cook, then the offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach at Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale, Ariz. Cook was preparing his players, including Andrews, for a 7-on-7 camp before Andrews’ junior season at Desert Mountain.
“I’m tired, Coach,” Andrews replied, “I’m just tired. I had three basketball games last night.”
By then, the 6-foot-5 Andrews was starting for one of the top age-group basketball teams in Arizona, and three tournament games on a summer night was just part of the grind.
“Let me ask you something,” Cook said as he threw the ball to Andrews. “How many guys that play basketball are 6-6?”
“I don’t know,” Andrews replied, “quite a bit.”
“And how many 6-5 or 6-6 guys do you see out there playing wide receiver on Saturdays or Sundays?”
“Uh, not that many.”
“Exactly,” replied Cook, a former wide receiver at Nebraska. “I’m not saying give up on basketball … but if I were you, I’d probably put basketball on the back burner a little more and concentrate on this right now, because this is where your bread could be buttered.”
By the time their little catch-and-chat session ended, Cook said, “the light bulb went on” in Andrews’ mind.
“I had been playing basketball a long time,” Andrews said. “I definitely loved it, and I wanted to put all my energy into it. … I had been playing with the top talent in the country for basketball since fifth grade.”
But Andrews said he also recognized, after just a couple of years of football, “It was a little lopsided in terms of how good I was in each [sport].”
That fall, for the first time, Andrews channeled his rare physical gifts and ferocious competitive drive toward football, setting him on a trajectory that has rarely slowed. Within a year, he had set scholastic receiving records in Arizona and Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops was in the Andrews home giving his recruiting pitch.
Andrews went on to become the nation’s top collegiate tight end at Oklahoma, an All-Pro in the NFL and, with a four-year contract extension signed in 2021, a face of the Ravens franchise for the foreseeable future. He’s done all that while living with Type 1 diabetes, which has made him an inspiration to children nationwide.
“He thinks he is going to be the best at whatever he does,” said Jack Andrews, the older of Mark’s two brothers, “and he just doesn’t accept anything else.”
Success Runs In The Family
Based on family history, Andrews was bound to be a success story.
Andrews’ father, Paul, is a urologist, and Jack is a urologic oncology fellow in Houston. Andrews’ sister, Annie, is a dentist, and his other brother, Charlie, works with their mother, Martha, for a successful Arizona real-estate business.
“If you want to be in that family, you better show up,” said Tony Tabor, Mark’s high school football coach, with a laugh. “There’s not a bad one in the bunch.”
Andrews had no football experience when he arrived at Desert Mountain, but Tabor saw the freshman dunk a basketball and thought, “Yeah, I think we can probably find something for him to do.”
Andrews had spent his younger years playing soccer, but the big, dominant player was subject to cheap shots from opposing players. One day, Martha recalled, Andrews returned the favor — and was ejected from a game.
“That’s it,” Andrews told his mom. “I’m done. We’re going into football.”
By then, Mark had sprouted to 6-foot-4, and Jack recalls coming home from college and going to the back yard to box with Mark, using some gloves their father had bought them.
“I remember he popped me in the face and knocked me down,” Jack recalled, “and I was like, ‘Well I’m not boxing him anymore.’ He’s in middle school and I’m in college. I come back and he’s dunking in the back yard.
“That was the first time I realized, ‘Wow, he’s a big man,'” Jack continued. “He’s just different. He definitely has a killer instinct. I think all of us are super competitive, and we all want to do really well, but Mark has this killer instinct. … He’s got that badass vibe where he’s ready to go at any time.”
Andrews topped 1,000 yards as a sophomore receiver at Desert Mountain, then had 81 catches for 1,494 yards and 21 touchdowns as a junior, catching passes from future NFL quarterback Kyle Allen. The former soccer player also served as the punter and kicker.
“Mark could have been an NFL kicker,” Tabor said. “If Mark wanted to play a defensive end type position, he could have done it. He was that athletic.”
With that size and those gaudy statistics, the scholarship offers poured in. Oklahoma always had the inside track; Andrews’ grandfather had attended the school, his father had been a huge Sooners fan, and his brother was in medical school there. The Andrews family even had a dog named Boomer.
When Stoops came for his recruiting visit, Martha showed him a photo of one of Mark’s soccer teams when he was a boy, but Stoops couldn’t pick out Mark. On the day that picture was taken, Andrews had switched to goalkeeper after scoring too many goals against an overmatched opponent. That big guy on the end of Row 2 in the red shirt? Stoops thought he was the coach.
Playing Through Diabetes
Martha Andrews had the usual maternal reservations about sending her youngest son to college, but in this case there was another massive consideration: At age 9, Mark had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a condition in which the pancreas doesn’t make insulin. Martha called it “a learning process for all of us” as she and her husband tried to let Mark live as normal a childhood as possible. Mark continued to play sports, but he received shots of insulin and had his glucose levels tested 10 to 20 times a day, his parents constantly on alert for dangerous deviations.
Sitting in the stands at a high school game could be “scary,” Martha said. “If Mark dropped a couple of balls, we knew his [blood-sugar] numbers were off. That just wasn’t him.” Martha would quickly make her way to the sideline and tell the trainer, “He needs to test.”
When Andrews first arrived at Oklahoma, Martha met with the coaches and medical staff to discuss his situation, and she insisted that Andrews have a roommate who could be dependable in a crisis. All of that came to bear on Sept. 25, 2014, when Andrews was serving a redshirt season.
During the Sooners’ bye week, they held a Thursday morning practice, a departure from routine that potentially could be problematic for a Type 1 diabetic. After practice, Andrews’ suitemate, long snapper Wesley Horky, called out to Andrews to see if he wanted to get lunch. Getting no answer, Horky figured Andrews might have dozed off, so after a few minutes, he went into Andrews’ room in Headington Hall.
“I walked in there and he was unresponsive, just staring at the ceiling,” Horky recalled. “I had never seen anything like that. … I went up to him and shook him, like, ‘Hey, dude, what’s going on?’ And he doesn’t say anything.
“On our first day on campus, Martha had given me her number, and a laundry list of contact information in case something like this comes up,” he continued.
A thousand miles away, Martha Andrews was in a Walmart parking lot when her phone rang. Horky was on the other end.
“I could hear the panic in his voice,” she recalled.
“I said, ‘Can you go across the hall to get one of the boys to help you?’ And he said, ‘I’m not leaving Mark.'”
Martha surmised that Andrews was hypoglycemic, his body reacting to a dangerously low blood-sugar level. She told Horky to try to get Andrews to eat one of his fruit chews to get some sugar into his system. She told Horky to hang up and call 911, and Martha called the Oklahoma training staff.
The next 10 minutes “felt like forever,” Horky said, but soon he could hear sirens. As many as 10 paramedics and athletic trainers flooded the room, and between the fruit chews and the paramedic care, Andrews gradually stabilized.
Horky said he had no prior experience with Type 1 diabetes care, and almost sheepishly said, “I don’t know why they picked me as the intelligent, responsible [roommate], but that kind of worked out.”
“Maybe,” he added with a chuckle, “it goes with being a long snapper.”
To Martha Andrews, this was yet one more win for the Oklahoma coaching staff.
“I told them I needed [them] to have some real thought about who his roommate was going to be,” she said. “I was very specific, and they listened to me. It was huge.”
That was the last such episode for Andrews, but he has stressed that Type 1 diabetes is a 24/7 opponent. These days, Andrews always wears a Dexcom continuous glucose monitor that can be tracked via app by the Ravens’ medical staff, his agents and yes, his mother. He normally wears a pump that delivers insulin, though he disconnects it and leaves it on the sideline during games.
Andrews is one of eight current NFL players with Type 1 diabetes, according to Kenya Felton of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and Andrews has become a major supporter of the JDRF. He donated Pro Bowl bonus money to the organization, and the JDRF has been Andrews’ chosen charity in the NFL’s “My Cause, My Cleats” campaign. Families living with Type 1 diabetes sometimes seek out Andrews at road games.
Third-Round Steal
Andrews’ diabetes could have been a medical red flag for some NFL teams, but scouts had other concerns as well, even though Andrews had won the John Mackey Award as the nation’s top tight end in 2017, his redshirt junior season. (Oklahoma had moved him from wide receiver early in his freshman year.) He totaled 62 catches for 958 yards and eight touchdowns in his Mackey Award-winning season, then declared for the draft.
On Andrews’ official NFL draft profile, an anonymous AFC scout questioned his blocking ability and described him as “a great big slot receiver” and “average athlete” with a Day 3 draft grade.
Andrews didn’t have to wait until Day 3 to hear his name called, but his selection in the third round hardly generated headlines among Ravens fans; they were still buzzing about the team jumping back into the first round to draft Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson the night before.
In fact, Andrews wasn’t even the first tight end taken by the Ravens that year. That honor went to Hayden Hurst, picked seven spots before Jackson. Three tight ends — Hurst, Mike Gesicki (No. 42) and Dallas Goedert (No. 49) — went off the board before Andrews.
If he was bitter about lasting until late in the third round, Andrews never showed it. He said he felt fortunate to be drafted by an organization that “always had a history of loving their tight ends” — understandable since the guy making the draft calls all those years was general manager and Hall of Fame tight end Ozzie Newsome. (His last draft class as GM included Andrews.)
Andrews acknowledged at rookie minicamp in 2018 that his blocking would need to improve, and Indianapolis Colts safety George Odum learned in 2020 just how far it had come. Andrews lined up on the left side and drove Odum into the end zone and straight into the turf, giving Jackson a free lane for a 9-yard touchdown run.
Offensive coordinator Greg Roman said Andrews’ perimeter blocking “has been very dominant at times, which has sprung a lot of big plays. … If you can’t block out there, you can’t really run those plays.”
Roman also noted that Andrews’ body has changed in his four NFL seasons.
The 6-foot-5, 256-pound Andrews “looks like a completely different athlete” from when he was drafted, Roman said. “He’s chiseled. He’s rocked up.”
Catching the ball, though, is, in Kelly Cook’s words, where Andrews’ bread is buttered.
From their first rookie training camp together, Andrews and Jackson displayed the on-field chemistry that offensive coordinators dream about.
By the end of the 2018 season, Jackson had supplanted Joe Flacco as the team’s starting quarterback, and Andrews had supplanted Hurst as the Ravens’ top rookie tight end. Andrews led all NFL rookie tight ends with 552 receiving yards.
That set the stage for a 2019 season in which Jackson won the league MVP award and Andrews earned his first Pro Bowl appearance with 64 catches for 852 yards and 10 touchdowns, leading the team in all three categories.
Andrews consistently got open in the areas of the field where Jackson was most comfortable throwing the ball, and if a play broke down, Jackson and Andrews improvised in ways that Jackson likened to “street ball.”
Before last season, on Andrews’ 26th birthday, the team signed him to a four-year, $56 million extension, reiterating owner Steve Bisciotti’s stated goal to invest in “ascending players.”
Andrews responded with a career year, even as the injury-decimated team sputtered to an 8-9 record. Despite Jackson missing five games, Andrews set franchise records for catches (107) and receiving yards (1,361). He caught nine touchdown passes and earned his first All-Pro honor.
As the Ravens look to return to the postseason, Andrews figures to be leading the charge, if not overtly then by example. Many highly paid veterans opt out of OTA activities. Andrews isn’t one of them.
“I love football. I love this place. I love this organization,” he said in May after reporting for voluntary workouts. “It means a lot to me, just getting back and getting better.”
Many veterans will take a day or two off during the grueling heat of training camp. Andrews isn’t one of them. He hardly ever takes a rep off, and during breaks, he often reviews plays on a device on the sideline.
“His competitive nature is so impressive to me,” tight end Nick Boyle said. “He’s always out there wanting to compete. … If one play doesn’t go right, he gets fired up, or if he makes a great play, he gets fired up. That stuff is kind of contagious.”
After signing his life-changing contract extension, Andrews stressed that, “I never started playing football for the money. That’s never what it’s been about.”
He has repeatedly made clear, from Day One with the Ravens, what it is about:
“The goal is to win the Super Bowl,” he said, “and after that, it’s to win more.”
Photo Credits: Kenya Allen/PressBox and Courtesy of Martha Andrews