ON THE DAY his daughter was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, DJ Eliot wrote a message to himself on his phone: "Make Drue's day the best it can be." He set it as a 7 a.m. alarm, and every morning for the next six years, those same words pinged across the screen like a mission statement.
Drue was 12 when she first got sick, and DJ wanted to quit coaching to care for her. He was certain that was the only job that mattered, but Drue wouldn't allow it.
She loved being a coach's kid, and she refused to let cancer take that from her. Eventually, DJ came to understand football's place.
The game afforded Drue a source of happiness, and it gave him the chance to provide her with as many good days as possible. That's why he was in Raleigh in the fall of 2025, four games into a new job as defensive coordinator at NC State , while Drue and the rest of his family remained in New Jersey, close to her doctors.
He left, he said, for Drue. "I had a purpose," DJ said.
"The only way I could make it was to compartmentalize my feelings, and the only way I could do that was from Drue's inspiration." Still, the guilt could be overwhelming, and after issuing its mission statement again each morning, DJ's phone could devolve into a source of dread by day's end. On the field, he was hard-wired to football, but when practice ended, he'd retreat to the locker room and his phone would offer the latest -- and increasingly grim -- news about Drue.
On Sept. 19, the phone offered a reprieve.
Drue was emaciated and exhausted, but a scan showed no signs of cancer in her lungs, where doctors expected a relapse to occur. It was likely an infection now playing havoc with her body, and for DJ, that was good news.
Anything other than cancer was good. He listened to the message, then slumped in a chair, alone in the locker room, and sobbed.
A day later, NC State endured a frustrating loss to Duke , and DJ again found another message waiting on his phone. It was from Drue.
It said, simply, "Love u." DJ took a breath and tapped out a response: "I love you, too. Sorry about the game." Drue, usually his most direct critic, offered support.
"Do not apologize," she replied. "Just move on to the next game." But there would be no next game for Drue as she would die before NC State kicked off again.
Three days after that Duke loss, DJ returned from practice to find another message. The doctors had overlooked something.
There was cancer in Drue's liver, something her oncologist had never seen in someone with her history; something they hadn't been looking for. Drue was deteriorating quickly.
On Wednesday, DJ's wife, Miekel, announced Drue would start a new chemo regimen -- experimental, a last hope. For six years, Drue had grasped so many last hopes and survived.
She would do it again, DJ told himself. Thursday brought a message from Drue's doctor, concerned he hadn't fully understood how bleak Drue's situation had become.
"DJ," she said, "you need to come home." DJ HADN'T PLANNED to become a coach. His father is a dentist, one brother is an endodontist and the other is an attorney.
DJ studied science at Wyoming while playing linebacker on the football team. He had a year of school left when his playing days ended, and Mark Stoops, an assistant on the staff, asked whether DJ wanted to help with the scout team linebackers.
"And that was it," he said. "I fell in love with it." He married Miekel in 2001, followed Stoops to Houston for a GA job, then on to Miami , Texas State , Tulsa , Rice and Florida State before landing as Stoops' defensive coordinator at Kentucky in 2013, adding four kids to the family along the way: son Dawson and daughters Drue, Page and Reace.
They had all embraced the often chaotic lifestyle of a football family -- except for Saturdays. The games were too stressful for everyone.
Everyone except Drue. She watched with intensity, lambasting a linebacker who couldn't hold up in coverage or a tackle who failed to fill a gap.
"She was the most competitive one," DJ said. "She hated to lose." When Kentucky lost to woeful Vanderbilt in DJ's first year as coordinator, Drue cried.
Her grandmother asked whether she was worried her dad would get fired. "No," she screamed.
"If we can't win, I don't want to be here." Even as her cancer worsened and the drugs left her groggy, she'd point at the TV and yell. "Who's that?
He's terrible!" Each time DJ landed a new job and the family moved, Drue would make new friends by joining the soccer or basketball team, where s