LeRoy Irvin

LeRoy Irvin made his living taking the ball away from other people, and yet the afternoon that carried his name into the record book was one he spent chasing it. A cornerback for the Los Angeles Rams through the 1980s, Irvin was also one of the most dangerous punt returners of his era, and in a single game in 1981 he turned two Atlanta punts into touchdowns and piled up 207 return yards, still the most any player has gained in one NFL game. Irvin died on July 1, 2026, at the age of 68. The Rams, the team he served for a decade, announced his death the following day. He had been battling throat cancer, the reporter Eric Geller said; the club did not give a cause.

He was born on September 15, 1957, at Fort Dix, the Army base in New Jersey, and grew up in Augusta, Georgia, where he played at Glenn Hills High School. He went on to the University of Kansas, was twice named second-team All-Big Eight, and in 1980 the Rams drafted him in the third round, the 70th player chosen. Late-round cornerbacks out of programs far from the national spotlight are meant to be depth, signed to be replaced. Irvin instead held a starting job in Los Angeles for the better part of ten years, which is the far harder thing to do.

His first headlines came with a punt hanging in the air. In 1981, his second season, he led the NFL in punt-return yardage, and the game against the Falcons, a 37-35 Rams win in which he scored on returns of 75 and 84 yards, gave him a single-game record that has now stood for forty-five years. A punt returned for a touchdown is one of the rarest scores in football, a lone return man beating an entire coverage team; to do it twice in one afternoon is the kind of thing that happens once and is never matched. It made him a player the other side had to account for on every kick, the way they already had to on every throw.

That double threat was the fuller measure of him. Irvin intercepted 35 passes over his career and ran five of them back for touchdowns, picking off at least one in ten of his eleven seasons. He was a fixture in a Rams secondary that reached the playoffs seven times in the decade and played for the NFC championship after the 1985 and 1989 seasons; in a 1983 playoff win over the Dallas Cowboys he returned an interception 94 yards. He went to Pro Bowls after the 1985 and 1986 seasons and was named first-team All-Pro as both a punt returner and a cornerback, an honor most defenders never earn at one position, let alone two.

The Rams released him in the spring of 1990, ending a ten-year run, and he closed his career with a single season for the Detroit Lions. He stayed close to the men he had lined up beside: he and the Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson became business partners in a licensed NFL memorabilia venture, one of the ties that outlived the locker room. Announcing his friend's death, Dickerson called him "my brother, teammate, and Rams legend," and "a true friend and a great man who always brought incredible energy."

He is survived by his four children. Forty-five years after those two punt returns, the record still belongs to him.