Instead of wearing his No. 7 jersey in the 2016 Valero Alamo Bowl, Oregon wide receiver Darren Carrington donned No. 22 to pay tribute to his late best friend Markel Byrd, who died suddenly on Dec. 22 and wore No. 22 as a safety for the New Mexico Lobos.
Although the Ducks squandered a 31-0 halftime lead and ultimately fell 47-41 to TCU in triple-overtime, Carrington individually put on a show in Byrd’s honor, catching four passes for 100 yards and a touchdown in the first quarter alone.
“We were inseparable,” Carrington told reporters in San Antonio about a week before the game. “We were like the same person.”
They used to play against each other in Pop Warner football and first became teammates on a club basketball team in the summer after sixth grade. They became best friends as seventh graders, and eventually attended high school together at Horizon Christian Academy in San Diego, where Byrd was the quarterback of the football team and Carrington the star receiver.
Carrington’s youngest sister DiJonai Carrington, a guard for Stanford women’s basketball, said the two were “basically brothers.”
“Even if they didn’t have the same classes, somehow you would always see them finding their way to each other,” DiJonai Carrington said. “They talked every single day, even after high school. They would FaceTime multiple times a day.”
http://www.dailyemerald.com/2016/01/02/forever-young-for-darren-carrington-alamo-bowl-was-more-than-a-game/