It's impossible not to root for Colts LB Brackett

	Colts LB Gary Brackett finished the season with 85 solo tackles in 14 games. Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
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Grant Brackett wanted his brother Gary to buy a Porsche. Gary bought a Yukon. This is why I love Gary Brackett.

I first met Gary, now a Colts linebacker, five football seasons ago, when he was a senior linebacker and captain at Rutgers. He wasn't particularly showy, or really that great of a quote, but he was unfailingly polite and there was something oddly endearing about how he already looked like an older man.

Game weeks went on and I found out he'd sort of already lived the life of an older man. He'd twice been an All-South Jersey linebacker in high school, but at maybe 5-foot-11 (Brackett refused to stand still long enough for me to actually measure him), not one college came calling.

Tuition was $14,000 at Rutgers in 1999 and none of Gary's three older brothers had managed more than a year of college, but Gary convinced his parents he would. So Granville and Sandra Brackett took out a loan against their house and Gary went to the State U.

A year later (with a B-plus average) he walked onto the football team. He played some special teams and came back for another year. The Bracketts refinanced again. Except this time, Granville, whose Vietnam duties included escorting bodies back to the states and who had a slowly deteriorating heart, was having trouble with his military pension. And Sandra, whose RN salary wasn't quite cutting it, was having trouble finding a flexible enough second job.

Just as Gary thought his football career was done, Rutgers came through with a scholarship. The next year he was Rutgers' starting middle linebacker and a junior captain. Granville, who couldn't maneuver inside Rutgers Stadium, would park himself in the car and listen on the radio.

Then came Brackett's last year, my first on the beat, when Rutgers went 1-11. The team was completely overmatched and no season could have moved slower. But every week those determined Scarlet Knights would go out and fight -- because of Brackett. He'd yell his teammates to run their sprints faster, he'd bat them on the helmet when they'd get a flag; he was a one-man ego-booster, somehow convincing them the beating we all knew was inevitable wasn't.

Rutgers' postseason banquet had been an unnecessary luxury the years before, but that year, Gary asked his parents to scrape together $80 -- the cost of two tickets. Sandra said she about passed out when head coach Greg Schiano held up Rutgers' MVP trophy and called out Gary's name. Granville gleefully recalled that Gary had been too fat to play Pee-wee football.

End there and this already is a great story, a fairy-tale for future walk-ons, a reminder for the cynical that college football isn't all corrupt.

But then the 5-11, 235-pound, small-in-the-Big East Brackett went and signed a free-agent contract with the Colts in 2003. Then he stuck. He made the opening-day roster, he became a special-teams starter and he once so loudly laid out a return man, he made SportsCenter.