‘Near-death’ experience as a child motivates Pitt long snapper Byron Floyd to give back
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On a cold December day, a week before Christmas 2011, two young brothers walked outside their grandpap’s house in the tiny town of Waite Hill, Ohio.
They planned to toss a football around for a short time before returning to the warmth of the house where they had been watching the Ohio State basketball game.
Byron Floyd Jr., who is entering his second season as Pitt’s starting long snapper, was three days past his 10th birthday. Younger brother Brennen was 8.
Neither boy minded the chill in the air or the snow that started to fall.
“A real peaceful snow,” their father, Byron Sr., remembers.
It didn’t take long for the calm to turn to terror.
Walking through the woods, the boys discovered a manhole cover and started jumping on it.
“It was definitely something that a kid does,” Byron Floyd Jr. said Friday after practice. “Just a dumb thing that we did.”
The manhole cover was hiding a 20-foot well that — as the boys shockingly discovered — was almost full of water. Byron and his brother crashed through and immediately found water up to their necks.
“At first, I tried to pull myself up,” Byron said, “but with the water and the amount of clothes we had on because of the cold, there was no way.”
Fortunately, he spied a black tube hanging from one of the walls and grabbed it. Brennen clutched Byron’s wrist on the other arm and hung on, a feat of strength that belied his young age.
“I’m not sure what (the tube) was even for, but it saved our lives,” Byron said. “It was freezing cold. We started screaming right away. No one was around. It was just us in the middle of winter.”
They turned to prayer.
“We were praying the whole time,” he said. “That was really the first time I really felt God in our presence.”
Said Byron Sr.: “We brought our children up with religion, nothing crazy, going to church, not consistently. But they thought they were going to die.”
For about the next 30 minutes, the boys, who, admittedly, were not great swimmers, treaded water while hanging onto each other and the sides of the well. Byron said his hands hurt from clutching tight to the tube, and he ended up with marks on his wrist “for how tight my brother was hanging on.”
Fortunately, the boys’ aunt, Ashley Olson, was visiting from Florida for the holidays and was getting in her car for a trip to her grandmother’s house.
The boys’ absence didn’t raise immediate concerns, but she was curious of their whereabouts.
“Before I got in the car, I decided to find out where the two knuckleheads were,” Olson wrote a few weeks later in a personal essay. “So I called, ‘Byron, where are you?’ ”
The boys had been screaming almost from the minute they hit the water. Eventually, Olson heard faint cries coming from the woods.
She ran back to the house, her father called for help, and she raced toward the voices, relieved that their cries meant the boys were alive.
After a struggle, she pulled the 100-pound Byron to safety. With Byron’s help, she pulled the smaller Brennen from the well, but he was suffering from hypothermia and lost consciousness.
“He was unconscious for a long time,” Byron Sr. said. “His body temperature had gone down to 80 degrees. It was a real scary time. Byron was cold, but it pays to be a little chubbier sometimes at that age.”
Brennen was transported to Cleveland’s Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital where he made a full recovery in about a day. Which ties the rest of the story to the NCAA’s relaxed name, image and likeness rules.
In the tradition of Pitt’s long snappers’ use of NIL for something other than personal gain, Floyd has initiated a fundraising effort through his website, snapper49.com. The goal is to raise $49,000 for UPMC Children’s Hospital through clothing sales, and Snapper49 steak seasoning and hot sauce. There are also plans for football camps and a golf outing this summer. Floyd wears No. 49.
Floyd said was inspired by former Pitt long snapper Cal Adomitis, who allowed his hair to be shaved in 2021 as part of a $135,000 fundraising effort for Children’s Hospital.
“A way to give back for what the hospital did for my brother,” Floyd said. “Watching Cal do it and watching Cal with the kids and having his hair shaved off, I just want to make an impact on these kids’ lives in any way I can.
“NIL is the reason we can do this. I’m trying to use it in a way that other people may not be.”
With the exception of his fiancee, Carmen Chiappone, Floyd has told almost no one — not even his Pitt teammates — about the details of what he called “a near-death experience.”
“We don’t talk about it a lot,” Byron Sr. said. “It haunted us for a long time, the what-ifs.”
Byron Jr., 21, is reminded daily by a cross his father gave him that he keeps by his bed in Pittsburgh. On the cross, there is a Bible verse from Psalm 34:4.
It reads: “I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.”
“That verse has really stuck out,” he said.
After arriving as a walk-on, Floyd has turned into a valuable member of Pitt’s team. He was the snapper for each of Ben Sauls’ five field goals in the Sun Bowl victory last season against UCLA. He also is the first Pitt long snapper in anyone’s memory to recover two fumbles on punt coverage in separate games in the same season.
Byron Sr. said his sister Ashley could have driven away that day, but a last-second decision to look for her nephews likely saved their lives.
“Pretty crazy story,” Byron Sr. said. “You think about life and little decisions people make and how it can go one way or the other.”