Every NFL franchise files a version of the same document each spring: a transactions memo, three sentences long, timestamped the day a free agent signs. The Colts’ version, filed in mid-March, described safety Jonathan Owens as entering his eighth season after he agreed to a one-year deal on March 17. I noticed it around the time it posted, because tracking a backup safety’s contract status is apparently how I spend some Tuesdays, and then didn’t think about it again until August, when a different number quietly replaced it.
That number was nine. Simone Biles put it there, in an Instagram story from Colts training camp at Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield, Indiana, with “Year 9” written across a photo of her husband, framing it as his ninth year in the league. A separate reel from the same visit, captioned with a line about football being back and “in this life & the next,” did the actual viral work. Between the two posts, Owens’ NFL tenure had somehow gained a year, and almost nobody sharing either one seemed to notice, because nobody was there for the arithmetic. They were there for the couple.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcJ3IQWO95S/
None of this is a knock on the genre so much as a symptom of what it trains an audience to look for. When a famous person’s spouse shows up at training camp, the entire apparatus of engagement (captions, reposts, aggregation blogs) points a reader toward one axis of interest: is this romantic, is this cute, does it say something about the marriage. People magazine ran the training-camp visit as a style story, full stop:
https://x.com/people/status/2093091231966298453
That’s not a criticism of People. That’s just what the beat is designed to notice. It’s the same three-camp-video cycle that runs every August with a rotating cast of quarterbacks’ girlfriends, and it isn’t built to ask the other question sitting right there in the frame: why this specific guy still had a locker in the eighth or ninth year of a career nobody drafted him into.
Because that’s the actually strange part of Jonathan Owens’ story, once you sit with it. He signed with the Arizona Cardinals in 2018 as an undrafted free agent out of Missouri Western State, a program not exactly crawling with area scouts, then tore his ACL in offseason work and played zero games. Arizona didn’t keep him for 2019. Houston did, on the practice squad, and he got into one game that year. Then six the next season. Then seven. By 2022 he was a full-time starter for a 17-game season, and he hasn’t stopped being useful to an NFL roster since: Green Bay in 2023, two seasons in Chicago after that, and now Indianapolis on a one-year deal. Along the way he’s collected two interceptions, ten pass breakups, two forced fumbles, three tackles for a loss, and 295 tackles across 82 games, plus a special-teams workload that’s climbed every year, capping at 264 snaps last season. That’s the type of number that keeps a fringe roster player employed long after anyone remembers his draft status, or lack of one.
Undrafted defensive backs mostly don’t get this far. Most get one training camp, sometimes two, then a text message. The rare ones who survive long enough to accumulate a stat line usually get a cycle of coverage built around exactly that survival: the scrappy-walk-on-turned-starter feature, the local news segment, the midseason beat-writer profile about the guy nobody wanted. Austin Reaves got that treatment on the basketball side, all the way to a max contract and a permanent spot in the scouts who passed on him canon. Owens has quietly been living the football version of that story for six years, and the profile never got written, because there was a more famous person standing next to him on the red carpet.
The eight-versus-nine discrepancy deserves a second look, because it isn’t really a contradiction. It’s two honest ways of counting the same career. The Colts’ “eighth season” counts years Owens actually played a regular-season snap, which excludes 2018, the year of the torn ACL and zero games. Biles’ “Year 9” counts calendar years since he signed, which includes it. Neither number is wrong. But it’s telling that the count nobody fact-checks is the one that comes from the more famous half of the marriage, while the team’s own paperwork, dry and unglamorous and actually about football, gets overwritten without a second thought.
The counterargument is obvious, and I don’t want to wave it off: this is also, uncomplicatedly, a wife showing up for her husband’s job, and that’s a nice thing regardless of whose platform is bigger. Biles’ summer wasn’t easy. She described a medical scare in June, while Owens was away at Colts practice, as one of the scariest experiences of her life. The two of them still made it to the ESPYs together in July, matching in champagne and brown. Camp week reads differently against that backdrop. It’s not staged content; it’s two people checking in on each other in public because their lives happen to already be public.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcPJc4WuHmd/
None of that requires the discourse to stop where it stopped, though. Owens plays Baltimore in the season opener on September 13, still trying to hold a roster spot he’s had to re-earn basically every year since 2018. That’s the harder story, and it’s sitting in the same frame as the easier one, waiting for someone to look past the caption.
