Quarterback Eli Harmon of the Redwood Ravens had struggled all season, feeling lost after his starter injury. Assistant coach Tommy Voss encouraged him, but Eli still doubted himself.

Late one Friday night, after a quiet walkthrough, Eli found a handwritten playbook on his locker, signed only with the initials “C.M.” He assumed it was a typo.

During Sunday’s game, using plays from the mysterious book, Eli led a 92-yard comeback drive. After the win, he asked the league office about C.M. — there was no record of anyone by that name in the organization.

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The Playbook

Eli Harmon sat alone in the Redwood Ravens’ film room long after the projectors went dark. It was week nine, and the season had become a slow-motion car crash. The starter, Jalen Carter, had torn his ACL in week two. Eli, the backup who’d spent four years holding a clipboard and smiling for cameras, was suddenly the guy.

He was 2-6.

Every Sunday he felt like a man wearing someone else’s body. His throws sailed. His reads came a half-beat late. The play sheet on his wrist might as well have been written in Aramaic. After the latest loss (a 34-10 embarrassment in Seattle), reporters asked if he still believed he could be “the guy.” Eli had stared at the microphone and said, “I’m trying,” which everyone understood meant no.

Assistant coach Tommy Voss, a former journeyman quarterback who’d been cut seven times before he turned thirty, found him in the empty quarterback room at midnight.

“You still breathing?” Tommy asked, tossing him a bottle of water.

“Barely.”

“Look, kid,” Tommy said, sitting on the table. “I’ve been where you are. Difference is, nobody expected me to be good. You, they still think you can be. That’s a gift. Don’t waste it hating yourself.”

Eli managed half a smile. “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one throwing hospital balls to your mom’s age group.”

Tommy laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, and left him alone with the silence.

Friday came. the same way every week did now: gray skies, sore ribs, dread. The Ravens were hosting Cleveland, a team that hit quarterbacks the way hurricanes hit trailer parks. Walkthrough that afternoon was quiet; even the coaches seemed to be moving in slow motion. When it ended, Eli lingered to re-tape his ankles, then trudged back to his locker.

On the small shelf sat a spiral-bound playbook the color of old paper. Not the laminated iPad version the team used. This was real paper, edges soft, cover blank except for two handwritten initials in black Sharpie: C.M.

Eli flipped it open. The pages were filled with diagrams—clean, precise, drawn by hand. Formations he’d never seen. Motion shifts that looked illegal until you realized they weren’t. Protections that turned blitzes into picnic routes. Every play annotated in the same neat handwriting, small encouraging notes in the margins:

Trust your eyes here. The safety cheats—take the shot. You’ve got more time than you think.

At the bottom of the last page, in larger letters:

For the nights you forget who you are. —C.M.

Eli looked around the empty room. “Funny, Voss,” he muttered. Tommy loved old-school stuff; probably thought this was clever motivation. A typo for T.V., maybe. Eli almost threw it in the trash, then didn’t. Something about the weight of it felt… respectful. He stuffed it in his bag.

Sunday arrived cold and loud. Cleveland jumped to a 27-10 lead with six minutes left. The stadium sounded like a funeral with concessions. On the sideline, Eli’s hands shook so badly he could barely buckle his chinstrap.

Tommy leaned in. “You still got that antique I left you?”

“That was you?”

Tommy looked genuinely confused. “Left you what?”

Eli stared, then laughed once—sharp, disbelieving—and pulled the paper playbook from his bag. He flipped to the two-minute section. The first play drawn there was titled “Dagger Switch – vs. Zero.” He’d never run anything like it.

He called it anyway.

The ball snapped. Receivers crossed, the free safety bit hard, and the slot man came wide open down the seam. Eli threw it before he could think. Touchdown.

Next series: “Ghost Y-Corner.” Another completion. Then “Flood Bunch – RB Angle.” First down. The stadium noise changed pitch, the way a dying animal suddenly remembers it can scream.

Ninety-two yards. Four minutes and eleven seconds. When Eli took the final snap and knelt, the scoreboard read Ravens 28, Cleveland 27. The sideline exploded over him like surf.

In the chaos afterward, Eli hugged Tommy so hard the older man’s headset snapped.

“Where’d you even find those plays?” Tommy shouted over the music.

“You tell me! C.M.—your initials, right?”

Tommy pulled back, frowning. “Eli, my name’s Thomas Michael Voss. T.M.V. Who the hell is C.M.?”

That night, after the handshakes and interviews, Eli sat in the quarterback room again. The paper playbook lay open on the table. He took out his phone and called the Ravens’ director of operations, a woman named Denise who knew every soul who’d ever worn the logo.

“Denise, quick question. Anyone in the building—coaches, staff, scouts, anybody—initials C.M.?”

Long pause. “No, honey. Why?”

“Just… checking something.”

He hung up and stared at the cover. Then he opened to the final page again and noticed something he’d missed before. Beneath the line For the nights you forget who you are, someone had added fresh ink, still slightly tacky:

You remembered tonight. Proud of you, son. —C.M.

Eli’s throat closed. He knew that handwriting. He’d seen it on birthday cards when he was eight, on permission slips, on the last letter he ever received before the car accident that took both his parents when he was sixteen.

His father’s name had been Caleb Michael Harmon.

Eli pressed the playbook to his chest and cried the way he hadn’t since the funeral—quiet, grown-man tears that didn’t care who heard.

The playbook stayed in his locker the rest of the season. He never needed to open it again; every play was burned into muscle memory now. The Ravens made the playoffs at 9-8. Eli Harmon finished top five in comeback wins.

Reporters kept asking about the “old-school genius” on the staff who’d turned him around. Eli just smiled and said, “I had some help from family.”

Years later, long after he’d won a ring and made a couple Pro Bowls, Eli had the pages laminated and bound in leather. It sits on the desk in his office now. Sometimes, when young quarterbacks come by for advice, he’ll flip it open and point to the margins filled with his father’s small, steady encouragements.

Then he tells them the only truth that ever mattered:

“Some playbooks aren’t written for the field. They’re written for the dark. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, love finds a way to hand it to you exactly when you need it most.”