The University of Utah had eight sacks in its 31-17 win over Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl. The fifth one that night in New Orleans did not make most fan-made highlight reels on YouTube. But it was the most compelling.
For three seconds, No. 56 took on three SEC offensive linemen on his own before making a last-ditch, right-handed arm tackle of the quarterback.
It was both the final official tackle of Greg Newman’s football career, and everything he represented every time he pressed his fingers into the turf.
The Utes went on to cap a historic 13-0 season, helping elevate the program and university to a power conference just 18 months later.
Greg, a former walk-on who was taller and much less hefty than prototypical defensive tackles, was essential to that season’s perfection, coaches and former teammates said. Earlier in the season, he snagged an interception in a win against Wyoming even after his helmet was dislodged. Utah coach Kyle Whittingham said Greg’s success was due to his “sheer hard work and determination.”
Many of Greg’s teammates on defense went on to make tens of millions of dollars in the NFL. A couple won Super Bowls. For most fans, the Sugar Bowl was the last time they heard about Greg — who, like the estimated 98 percent of all college football players who don’t go pro, would have to learn to live a life beyond game days.
Newman playing for Utah in the 2009 Sugar Bowl. (Courtesy of Ty Cobb)
The game that gave him everything he wanted early on would play a significant role in keeping him from fulfilling his other goals: to have a family of his own. To work on Wall Street. To dig his snowboard into the powdery mountains above Park City. To live what he would often describe as a normal life.
Football, where family members said Greg “found his place in the world,” was also the stage on which he suffered irreversible damage.
Greg became one of the several hundred former football players diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive head trauma, for which football players are at a substantially higher risk.
Fifteen years after Greg left football, on the evening of May 21, 2024, The Ventura County Star published a news roundup identifying a local man who, four days earlier, had been found dead near the Highway 101 South onramp near Thousand Oaks, Calif., about 45 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.
The 38-year-old, described in the article as homeless, was Greg.
There were no signs of foul play, authorities reported. He was found face down with a sizable bruise on his forehead, believed to be a result of a fall. The summary of the end of Greg’s life in the local newspaper totaled 139 words. An autopsy would eventually reveal the cause of death was multiple organ failure, caused by kratom, a stimulant supplement he believed would help him get his life back on track.
Greg’s only sibling, Laura Dyer, a nurse who works in home health and hospice, had long suspected that his football career was the primary reason for his decline into an eventual state of mania. CTE symptoms range from mood changes and aggression to memory loss and confusion. He may also have had, she would eventually learn, a genetic predisposition for psychotic breaks.
“He just started changing,” Greg’s mother, Yvonne, said, “and we couldn’t figure out what was wrong.”
The family would turn to the stacks of journals Greg left behind, which detailed his tortuous decline but left much unanswered. Laura needed to know if she was right. Less than 48 hours after Greg’s body was discovered, in search of understanding, she made a call.
Always oversized for his age, Greg played with older age groups in youth football. But the big guy with a goatee was “a gentle giant” off the field, as Yvonne put it. He volunteered as Prince Charming, using his 6-foot-4, 250-pound frame at a fundraiser, where he danced with children who used wheelchairs. Another time he dressed up as Batman.
“Greg was always intense,” Yvonne said. “But on the football field, he compartmentalized everything. Off the field, he loved to make you laugh. He’d do anything for you.”
Newman poses as Batman with a young fan at an event. (Courtesy of the family of Greg Newman)
In the early 2000s, Greg starred as a linebacker for football powerhouse Westlake High School, often featured in the local paper that would inform the public of his death years later.
“I love contact,” he said in a December 2003 profile.
Greg spent one season at Colorado before transferring to Utah in 2005. He was soon asked to move from linebacker to the defensive line, where he eventually thrived. Two years after his arrival, he was placed on scholarship.
Greg’s senior year was his best. He had 50 total tackles and 9.5 tackles for loss. On a Utah defense that had seven starters drafted, it was Greg who was voted the team’s most inspirational player by his peers after an undefeated season.
“It didn’t matter what it was,” former Utah defensive coordinator Gary Andersen said, “he was going to keep fighting and clawing until he won his matchups. That’s what carried him through football.”
It’s what also nudged along a dream to fight and claw as a potential late-round draft pick or undrafted free agent ahead of the 2009 NFL Draft. But while training in the weeks leading up to that year’s combine, Greg tore muscles in his hamstring, essentially ending his playing career.
“In some ways, it was painful for him to see friends go on and be successful,” said Laura’s husband, Geoff, the insight coming from Greg’s journals, which he filled for years.
Greg played his final football game less than a month before he turned 23. By his 24th birthday, he began exhibiting worrisome behavior.
“That’s when the voices started,” Laura said.
Friends and roommates told his family that Greg’s irritability would spike in an instant. He had mental lapses, when he would just stare for minutes on end. He spoke to walls. In 2011, Greg told Laura that angels in his mind told him to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religion in which they were raised. He served in Florida, but was sent home after four months due to erratic behavior; the same thing happened when he was reassigned in Utah less than a year later.
Several therapists and attempts at prescription treatments came and went. Some thought he was suffering from bipolar disorder, some thought he was schizoaffective. Nothing was ever definitive.
But Greg’s decline ebbed and flowed. From 2014 to 2019, he had good spells that lasted as long as six months at a time. He worked for two international banks with branches in Salt Lake City. He had a girlfriend. He stayed in great physical shape. But he would not watch football. He told Yvonne that, if he could do it over again, he would’ve played soccer.
He moved to New York City in 2018. He was hired as an associate portfolio manager by Northern Trust and passed the first two stages of the Chartered Financial Analyst exam. Greg posted Instagram highlights of life in the city: 5K races, ramen restaurants, concerts and breathtaking views.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a pivot point. Greg went an estimated 50 straight days in isolation in his studio apartment, a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, during the spring of 2020, which exacerbated his symptoms. On May 9, 2020, he posted a smiling selfie with the caption, “Getting outside, my mom said it would be good for me.”
The smile would soon be harder to find. Greg’s episodes caused him to be fired from two jobs while in New York.
“In his altered state of mind, he couldn’t understand why nothing was working out for him,” Laura said. “No matter what he did, it all just kept falling apart.”
By August, Greg was back in Southern California, working as a chief financial officer for a friend’s family trucking business. But the final unraveling, family members said, had begun.
“His imaginary world was more real to him than this,” Yvonne said. “There wasn’t a light side to him anymore.”
Greg’s journal entries from that time showed only faint glimpses of his former self. He wrote about a lot of things. Some real, most not. Finding a book so rare it would change his life, references to “coronation day intel,” and “The Stick of Ramses.” Ancient Egypt became an obsession. Crystals, too. Football, meanwhile, was still drifting about in his mind. He wrote about a rally to win a game with a 2-point conversion, just as Utah did against Oregon State during the 2008 season.
“He was suffering to a degree that was just unbelievable,” Yvonne said.
The last few years of his life featured stints in voluntary transitional hospitals, long-term treatment centers and sober-living housing. Therapists who worked with Greg said he was no longer mentally fit to hold a part-time job.
Experts again oscillated between diagnoses of Bipolar Type II and schizoaffective disorder. No health care professional, Yvonne said, ever raised the topic of CTE.
The prescription drug Greg always felt like he needed was Adderall, a stimulant used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He also used Vyvanse, a similar prescription for ADHD. Those drugs, he believed, would help him focus. While in the treatment center, Yvonne took Greg to take the third level of the CFA exam. He came out feeling like he did well. But he ended up failing.
Antipsychotic drugs like Abilify were administered to combat his episodes with limited effectiveness. He complained of feeling like a zombie, his father, Terry, remembered.
“It wasn’t Gregory,” Terry said.
Greg bounced between staying with family and living in his Toyota Prius. He began self-medicating on the street, where Greg lived the last year of his life. In December 2023, when Greg was living out of a tent, his parents brought Greg a meal on Christmas Day.
While he was often right in front of them, he was simultaneously nowhere to be found. And family members increasingly believed that CTE was the root cause of his decline.
“In a brutal business like football,” Terry said, “it seemed like an obvious possibility.”
Growing up, Greg was known around the playground as “The Bully Protector,” his lifelong friend Carlos Gonzalez remembered. If he saw kids pushed around by others, Greg always stepped in, even if he was younger.
It was brutal, Carlos said, that no one could help Greg.
He’d seen Greg speak in tongues. Greg would randomly call Carlos and cuss him out — or send a text saying how much he respected him.
Greg spent most of his final year wandering around local strip malls. At the library, where the librarians knew him by name, he researched the healing protective power of crystals. He tried to sell rocks, which he believed to be rare gems, in a Whole Foods parking lot. He stenciled poorly drawn pictures of dragons and inaccurate hieroglyphics and tried to sell them as cars passed.
“I bought one or two drawings from him just to help him and motivate him,” Carlos said.
Around that same time in January 2024, he attempted suicide in an apartment complex parking lot. Laura said a passerby saw the attempt in the front seat of his Prius and called 911.
Soon after, he threw a brick through the window of the Goebel Adult Community Center in Thousand Oaks, in an attempt to get help because he thought someone was chasing him with a hammer, he said.
He was charged with a felony, but the judge told the family it could be reduced to a misdemeanor so long as the damages were paid for and Greg stayed out of trouble.
In the meantime, he started excessively using kratom, an herbal substance that can be purchased without a prescription and is sold at most local cannabis stores, saying it helped him focus. The drug is not FDA approved, and if used excessively provides an opioid-like calming effect. Greg’s self-medicating, family members said, didn’t begin until the last year of his life.
In his final days, Greg was living out of the Motel 6 in Thousand Oaks, located just off Highway 101. A room goes for around $90 a night.
When Greg came back to his room on the afternoon of May 16, 2024, the door was locked. Laura said management told Greg he hadn’t paid for the night’s room. He wanted to go in and get his stuff; the police were called. Greg’s family believes that he panicked, knowing he couldn’t afford another strike. So he took off running.
The Ventura County Medical Examiner informed Yvonne last summer that he had so much kratom in his system that it caused his liver and kidneys to cease functioning.
Greg wasn’t seen again until a driver of a car entering the South 101 onramp the following day noticed his body. Authorities believed he had been dead for roughly 24 hours.
Greg’s family, though not surprised, experienced a collective state of shock and grief.
“We knew where it was headed for a while,” Geoff said.
There was a potential path toward closure, they all agreed. So Laura told her parents she was making the call. The same day the Ventura County Star published news of Greg’s body being found, Geoff launched a GoFundMe that raised over $4,000 to fund further research at the Boston University CTE Center. The target goal remains $5,656 — Greg’s jersey number, repeated.
Seated in her backyard in Utah, Laura dialed the BU CTE Center and told them about her younger brother.
His brain, eyes and spinal cord would need to be procured and sent to the CTE Center. A definitive diagnosis of whether a person suffered from CTE while they were alive can only be provided posthumously. The center takes a year to dissect portions of the brain and conducts extensive interviews with family members to decipher when bouts of aggression, paranoia and delusion began and how long they persisted.
Leading the study of Greg’s brain was Dr. Ann McKee, the director of the CTE Center, who, along with her colleagues, has been at the forefront of this medical research field.
The scientific breakthrough study of CTE in the early 2000s, and its tie to football, astonished many fans. Former NFL star linebacker Junior Seau, who took his own life in 2012, was diagnosed with CTE less than a year after his death. Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who at 27 hanged himself in prison after being convicted of murder, had what Dr. McKee would describe in 2017 as one of the most severe cases of the disease she’s seen in someone so young.
In 2023, the BU Center announced that CTE was diagnosed in 345 out of 376 donated brains, all former NFL players. In 2024, a third of former NFL players surveyed believed they had CTE, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Most of the brains donated to BU have been from former athletes who showed clear signs of CTE. But former NFL players like Jerome Bettis, Matt Hasselbeck and others have publicly pledged to donate theirs to help further the studies in the field.
While there is a clear link between CTE and football, researchers continue to search for reasons why some players develop symptoms and others don’t. Optimism remains that in the coming years, a blood test or brain scans could be used to reveal potential CTE symptoms.
A December 2023 study found that among 319 donors with college football experience, 70 percent had CTE. Greg is now one of an estimated 1,600 whose brains have been examined at BU.
“Football is far more than a sport,” Dr. McKee said. “It’s a culture, it’s a way of life, it’s a national identity. It’s a lot of things. But nobody wants to hear that it’s a problem.”
Greg is buried in a small cemetery in the shadow of Mount Olympus, the most striking peak of the Wasatch Range above Salt Lake City. His funeral was small and not publicized, but when the family arrived, his head coach, Kyle Whittingham, was there in a suit, standing near the last row of chairs.
“We were stunned,” Laura said.
Newman turns to the crowd in celebration during a game at the University of Utah. (Courtesy of Chad Zavala)
Greg’s celebration of life memorial was held June 29, 2024, six weeks after his death, in Farmington, Utah, where Laura and Geoff live. More than 13 million people once tuned in to see Greg register his sack in the Sugar Bowl, but fewer than 50 gathered in a room that could hold over 200. A few former teammates were in attendance.
“It seemed like he might’ve been forgotten in some ways,” said former Utah linebacker Mike Wright. “I was a little disappointed in some of my teammates for not showing up for him on that day. But for a lot of us, from afar, it was like the Greg we knew passed away long before.”
Former Utah tight end Colt Sampson offered an opening prayer and chuckled when reminiscing about his friend, the “ultimate get-it-done” personality.
Greg’s No. 56 framed jersey was displayed in the hallway of the church. A massive bouquet of crimson and white flowers sat near the pulpit. One attendee wore a Utah Utes tie. Gary Andersen, Greg’s defensive coordinator, greeted friends and family near the photos commemorating Greg.
Laura and Geoff tried to summarize the heights of Greg’s life — most tied to football — as well as his agonizing final 15 years. Greg opted for hard rock or heavy metal CDs on their early morning drives to Westlake High together, much to Laura’s dismay. His most cherished Bible story growing up was David and Goliath.
Greg’s true love was the game that permanently damaged his brain. On Wednesday, June 4, 2025, more than a year after his death, his family learned he had Stage 2 CTE.
“To hear that was a huge sigh of relief,” Laura said, “to hear that wasn’t really him.”
Yvonne said she’ll shoulder regret for the rest of her life. She wished she’d made him fall in love with golf instead. “The amount of suffering he went through?” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever watch another football game.”
Dr. McKee, who was permitted by the family to speak to The Athletic about Greg’s pathology report, said numerous lesions showed that Greg’s brain was in a state of degeneration for more than a decade.
While it’s indisputable that Greg was dealing with CTE, Dr. McKee said Greg’s history of psychotic episodes was more extreme than the majority of those they’ve studied. The most common early-stage symptoms of the disease include inability to control one’s own thoughts, behaviors or impulsivity, all of which Greg dealt with as the years wore on. But Greg might have had a genetic predisposition to psychotic breaks in addition to CTE.
“It’s difficult to fully account for those symptoms with CTE,” Dr. McKee said. “We’ve certainly seen people with a predisposition (have) more severe behavioral and personality changes than those who don’t. It was just more than we usually see.”
In April this year, just before Greg’s family received the diagnosis, members of the 2008 team gathered for a reunion inside Utah’s football facility. A poster of Greg in the Sugar Bowl commemorated his life. The team signed a ball and handed it to a tearful Yvonne. A video tribute included a segment for Greg.
The Newmans were also able to catch a glimpse of Utah’s spring practice. Terry noticed how many players wore spongy Guardian Caps, designed to lessen the impact of repetitive hits to the head.
Newman’s damaged helmet following the Sugar Bowl. (Courtesy of the family of Greg Newman)
Greg’s helmet from the Sugar Bowl still bears the scars of that epic evening.
The family came upon it soon after Greg’s death while sifting through storage, a coat of dust on the clear visor. The white, metal bars of the face mask are chipped. Deep, elongated gouges remain scattered across the red paint.
The helmet could one day be on display in a living room, a symbol of Greg’s life. But not quite yet.
(Top illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; photo courtesy of Ty Cobb)
