The nickname stuck to Dallas Baker from third-grade Pop Warner football through high school, like a badge he couldn’t unclip. Not that he tried to. It was so ingrained in his persona that when he arrived at the University of Florida as a freshman, he wrote it into the ‘Nickname’ box on the form for his practice shirts and shorts size. 

Other kids went by ‘CJ’ or ‘Junior.’ He was Dallas Baker, Touchdown Maker.

In his hometown, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, the only way out was as an athlete or rapper. If neither worked, you joined a gang and sold drugs. Baker wouldn’t have to worry about that. As a high school senior, he caught 17 touchdown passes. The News-Journal named him a Top 25 player in Volusia-Flagler County history. He was living out the lifelong dream, suiting up for the Florida Gators like his uncle, College Football Hall of Famer Wes Chandler.

But something other than a nickname followed Baker to Florida. During moments like this, when everything about his life seemed enviable from the outside, he’d experience an episode. The chills came first, then a wave of emotion that’s hard to describe unless you’ve felt it, an intense anxiety. It’d turned him into an introvert by the time he reached 13. His parents thought it was due to their divorce a year earlier. His extended family blamed the Devil.

Baker had undiagnosed depression. 

“I couldn’t really understand why everyone else was happy, but I felt alone,” Baker said.

And while football didn’t cause the depression, football did exacerbate it.

In late September 2004, the No. 11-ranked Gators traveled to Neyland Stadium for the unofficial SEC East Championship against No. 13-ranked Tennessee. The 109,061 people in the stands marked the largest attendance for an SEC football game. 

With 1:05 remaining and a 28-27 lead, Florida is stuffed on a third-and-3 run, bringing up fourth down. The Gators’ offense mills around the field, content to drain as much clock as possible. Tennessee is out of timeouts, and the game is essentially over.

Then a flag flies.

On the opposite sideline, as far away from the action as possible on a halfback dive, Tennessee cornerback Jonathan Wade shoves Baker in the facemask with an official staring at them. Baker pops Wade back, drawing the penalty. The second guy always gets caught.

The unsportsmanlike conduct backs Florida up 15 yards and, critically, stops the clock. Tennessee gets the ball with 55 seconds to play, drives down the field, and kicks the game-winning field goal as time expires.

Baker felt like his entire team hated him. After the Gators flew back to Gainesville, he was sleeping fitfully on the bus ride through campus when teammate Channing Crowder tapped him awake. Someone had spray painted a section of the graffitied 34th Street Wall white, and in black letters scrawled out, ‘THANKS BAKER.’ The next morning, his mailbox was open and overflowing with death threats. 

“A lot of people work Monday through Friday, and what the Gators do on Saturday determines how their week goes,” Baker said.

Head coach Ron Zook and his staff told Baker to go home for a few days to let the heat die down. He missed two days of practice back in New Smyrna Beach trying to convince his mother, Lolita McGraw, that people weren’t going to kill him. Baker was a pariah on the run for a crime.

But Baker’s mind was crueler to himself than the public conviction from Gator Nation. His whole life had led to playing football at Florida, and he was screwing it up. And if he didn’t make it to the league, his mom would never leave this house he now hid in. 

Nearly 20 years later to the day, Baker is still involved with the sport he once grew to loathe. This is his third season as Baylor’s wide receivers coach. He coaches his guys hard, like he’s working with the offensive line. But he loves them harder. They spend time at his house with him and his wife, Vanessa, and daughter, Angelina. 

He has no desire to be an offensive coordinator or head coach. This is the pinnacle of his profession. This is where he can make his biggest impact, convincing wide receivers like himself that football is what they do but not who they are. He lived as Dallas Baker, Touchdown Maker, and it brought him to hell and back. Now, he steers players away from that trap.

“My entire thing has been about helping people not make the mistakes I’ve made,” Baker said. “And letting them know your mistakes don’t define who you are.”

––

His Florida teammates were watching film of his second-consecutive 100-yard outing, and Dallas Baker was crying in the corner.

A junior now, Baker was blossoming into a star. But as he watched catch after catch in the team meeting, another episode came on in his mind. The wave of anxiety, the unforgiving self-talk. When am I getting hurt? I’m not good enough.

His wide receivers coach, Billy Gonzales, asked if he was alright. Baker got up, left the room and broke down on his hands and knees in the weight room. 

Baker credits Urban Meyer, who was hired as Florida’s head coach before his junior year, and Gonzales with saving his life. They spoke with their athletes about mental health and set Baker up with doctor consultations. That’s when he learned what he’d experienced since age 13 wasn’t the divorce or the Devil, but depression. 

This realization helped keep his mental health in check for a while. In 2006, Florida won the national championship, and Baker was named All-SEC First Team with 920 yards receiving and 10 touchdowns. No Gator wide receiver has recorded double-digit receiving touchdowns since. But the depression was still there, lingering. His parents were preachers, but Baker wasn’t strong enough in his faith yet to rely on it. Instead, he self-medicated by drinking and smoking alone in his dorm room. 

The Pittsburgh Steelers drafted him in the seventh round of the 2007 NFL Draft. Baker believes he was the third person to make it to the league from New Smyrna Beach, along with his uncle and former safety Darrell Fullington. With that honor came pressure. Everyone from his hometown told him to make this or that person proud. 

Without Meyer or Gonzales, his depression threatened to swallow him. He was relieved when the Steelers cut him on September 1, 2007. He’d been trying to quit. Then they signed him to the practice squad the next day. Baker played eight games in the 2008 season but was cut on November 15. 

He flew back to New Smyrna Beach and visited his best friend’s house. As he knocked on the door, two kids walking on the sidewalk bouncing a basketball started murmuring to each other. 

“Hey, that’s Dallas Baker,” one kid said. “I should go get his autograph.”

“Why do you want his autograph?” the other kid asked. “My dad said he got cut and he sucks.”

Baker was back in the town he’d worked so hard to escape, but what hurt worse was that it didn’t love him anymore.

Shortly after, he was signed to the Steelers’ practice squad again. Even on the practice squad, he was in the top .1 percent of football players. He made it. But his depression refused to allow him to see it that way. He was a camp body with no chance of seeing the field, going through the motions in a sport he didn’t want to play.

So he looked for a way out.

“I was in the NFL. I had made the team,” Baker said in a Twitter video posted on August 9. “My salary was $385,000 this year. And not once, but twice, I tried to take my life.”

––

To this day, Dallas Baker believes he could’ve been a Hall of Fame wide receiver. But his NFL career never panned out because he didn’t put forth the effort. He didn’t deal well with his depression, and it prevented him from realizing his full potential. 

After the Steelers cut him for good, Baker bounced around the Canadian Football League and Arena Football League because he didn’t know who he was without football. And because he didn’t have a strong relationship with God, he started living for the world. Living for the streets.

He went back to Orlando with $300,000 in the bank. He found new camaraderie with gang members once he was cut from the CFL for good. He drank. He sold drugs. He did drugs, though nothing up the nose. That $300,000 evaporated to $3,000.

In 2014, he had a slight heart attack after a night partying on the beach. A hospital visit uncovered left atrial enlargement. He’d been on the fast track to the bottom and decided this was as close as he wanted to get. He prayed to God for help. Baker wanted to do something to make a difference. He had a college degree. He’d played in the NFL. And if you saw him right now, you’d have no idea.

In October 2014, Baker returned home to live with his parents and rededicated his life to God. He began attending church regularly and made good on his relationship with his biological father. He was separated from his fiancee, Vanessa, at the time but still in his daughter Angelina’s life.

He was lifting in the New Smyrna Beach High School weight room one afternoon when his high school baseball coach walked in on him. Baker was in the middle of a personal transformation but still embarrassed by living with his parents at that age, so he told the coach he was just visiting. The coach said his son, David Moskovits, was the assistant baseball coach at a private Christian school called Warner University. They’d lost their wide receivers coach two days ago, if Baker was interested.

By 2015, Baker was coaching wide receivers at Warner University in NAIA football, below Division III, making $15,000 a year, and sleeping in his truck. He’d brush his teeth and shower in the locker room before anyone got there, then drive his car around to make it appear like he’d arrived at work. When the team bought pizza on game day, he’d circle by the trash can after the meal and grab the slices that didn’t touch the bag for later. 

“I didn’t get into this for money,” Baker said. “I got into this to make a difference. To use my platform to tell the world how great God is.”

The following season he reconnected with Vanessa and Warner gave him a house with the rent paid for. The only thing he had to worry about was the property taxes. But with only $15,000 and a daughter to care for, his home became a building without electricity or running water. In Florida. In the summer. So he’d stay at the school all day, going from practice to the cafeteria with the players. When they retired to their dorm rooms to play video games, he’d go too. His home was just a place where he slept.

In the moment he thought he was killing time, but today he feels God was working to make him a better coach by building relationships. The next year, Warner went from 2-9 to 9-2, and Baker coached two First-Team All-Conference receivers.

While he didn’t get into coaching for the money, the lack of funds became an issue. 

As spring football practice started, Baker began fasting and praying for a week about his future in the coaching profession. One day he jogged onto the field only to realize that he had forgotten his practice script in the office. When he got inside, his phone was ringing. It was Urban Meyer. Marshall head coach Doc Holliday had called Meyer asking if he had a recommendation for a wide receiver coach, and Meyer gave Baker’s name.

Baker had been living for the Lord for two years now and had risen from coaching NAIA football to a Division I wide receivers coach without serving as a quality control coach or graduate assistant. And a lot of people resented him for that. He developed a new nickname, this one uttered behind his back, ‘Dallas Meyer.’

But Meyer didn’t bring Baker to Marshall. God did.

He joined a program that just went 3-9 with a head coach on the hot seat. The next two seasons, he coached Tyre Brady to two 1,000-yard seasons, and the Thundering Herd won back-to-back bowl games. 

Holliday’s staff was fired after the 2020 COVID season, and Baker couldn’t get another job. At a crossroads again, he prayed and fasted for two weeks. On April 30, 2021, Buffalo head coach Lance Leipold resigned to take the Kansas job, and Baker told his wife he would be on Buffalo’s new staff.

Vanessa wasn’t a believer like her husband. She had code blued twice during Angelina’s birth, and had a hysterectomy after, which prevented her from having more children. In her early 20s at the time, the loss of what could’ve been was too much to bear. But on a family trip to Universal Studios, Baker got a call from new Buffalo head coach Maurice Linguist. Linguist had worked with Billy Gonzales, Baker’s college wide receiver coach, at Mississippi State, and was offering Baker the job without an interview.

Baker looked over at Vanessa, who was bawling.

She’s a believer now.

––

Dallas Baker doesn’t know how Baylor head coach Dave Aranda got his phone number. He’d never met him. He also wasn’t expecting other coaching offers after a 4-8 season at Buffalo. Yet here Aranda was, asking him to be the wide receivers coach of a program that just won the Sugar Bowl in 2021.

Three years later, Baker is still in Waco. Aranda convincing the Baylor brass to keep him as head coach this season after a 3-9 skid last year affected a lot more families than the coaching carousel talks about. Many thought Aranda and his staff wouldn’t be here in 2024. Baker didn’t think he would be either. Death or imprisonment was far more likely.

There’s a reason Baker’s suicide attempts failed, that the heart attack wasn’t strong enough to take him, that the gangs didn’t swallow him. And while he doesn’t know for sure what that reason is, he sees glimpses of it when he’s there for wide receiver Ketron Jackson getting baptized and then engaged. 

Baker tells his guys that they know who he is today but don’t know who he was yesterday. He was ‘Dallas Baker, Touchdown Maker,’ and there are more kids like him out there with an invisible struggle that they’re resigned to solving with an all-too-visible and permanent solution. He’s still on this Earth to find them.

Dallas Baker wasn’t supposed to be here. Which is why it’s so important that he is.