Tragedy has struck Indiana as a promising young football talent has been confirmed as one of the unfortunate casualties of the catastrophic floods that recently swept through the state.

The lifeless body of Matthew Morey was discovered on Saturday in the waters of the Mississinewa River, following a report of his disappearance, according to statements from the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office.

Authorities initiated a search for the 18-year-old after he and several companions plunged into the river near Muncie on Wednesday, officials disclosed.

The motive behind the group’s leap into the river remains a mystery. While deputies managed to rescue three individuals, Morey evaded their efforts and could not be found.

Confronted by perilous conditions, the search efforts were forced to cease on Thursday as the historic floodwaters continued to rage—a phenomenon described by many as a ‘once in a lifetime’ event.

Before he was found, his devastated mother, Angie Morey, searched tirelessly for her then-missing son. 

‘I’m hurt and I need some help, and so we’re not there and I can’t get there,’ Angie told NBC News as she cried on Friday. 

‘I can’t get to him because there’s no – I can’t get in a boat. If I had a boat, I swear to God I’d be in that water,’ she added, explaining that people were told the current was too strong to get in a boat. 

Angie sadly continued: ‘And my hope is that he’s still alive.’ 

Morey recently graduated from high school and was set to attend Perdue University, NBC News affiliate KYMA reported.  

At least six people, including Morey, lost their lives in the surging flood, and countless more have lost their homes as of Sunday morning. 

A four-year-old boy, 58-year-old woman, and two other females died in the flood, authorities said. Their identities are unknown at this time.   

At least 70 people had been rescued on Saturday, Indianapolis Fire Department spokesperson Rita Reith said. 

Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett declared a national emergency on Friday after days of heavy rainfall caused creeks and streams across the state to swell. 

President Donald Trump approved an emergency declaration for Indiana, and federal disaster assistance is available to the state, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

Hogsett said the city was dealing with its most severe flooding in more than 30 years and conditions were shifting rapidly.

Jacob Spence, director of Marion County Emergency Management, called it a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ flood.

‘This is an unprecedented event, and unfortunately we’re setting some new records,’ he told The Associated Press.

The National Weather Service reported that more than 11 inches of rain fell over a two-day period in some areas.

A Meal Train fundraiser has since been launched for the Morey family. 

They have requested that people make monetary donations or send gift cards instead of meals, the page read. 

As of Sunday morning, more than $15,000 had been raised for the grieving family. 

Locals came out for a massive candlelight vigil in honor of the teen. His heartbroken family was seen standing in the front row. 

A two-year-old girl named Alayna has been left fighting for her life in the hospital after she drowned when flood water took over her family’s basement, according to a GoFundMe fundraiser. 

The toddler was at home with her mother, Becky, and her 13-year-old brother, Liem, when their home in Rush County flooded, her aunt shared. 

Liem called 911 after finding his sister under water while their mother performed CPR on the little girl. 

Emergency responders couldn’t reach the home because the flood waters were too high, so a local farmer used his tractor to help them get to Alayna, the page read. 

She was airlifted to Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital and remains in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).  

Alayna has been placed on a ventilator, and as of Saturday, she had her ‘EEG monitor removed after showing no signs of seizure activity,’ her aunt shared in an update. 

Sadly, the little girl has contracted a bacterial infection in her lungs and breathing trials have not been successful. 

As of Sunday morning, more than $11,400 had been raised for her family. 

Breaking news… updates to follow. 

This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

At the tender age of 15, Kara Robinson Chamberlain endured a terrifying ordeal, being kidnapped by a serial killer. Today, she’s channeling her strength and insight into uncovering truths behind decades-old unsolved cases.

As the host of the intriguing true-crime series “Somebody Knows Something,” which is produced by ABC News Studios and Freeform, Chamberlain delves into the mysteries surrounding unresolved disappearances and murders. This series revisits each chilling case with the help of the victims’ families, aiming to shine a new light in hopes that it uncovers a lead crucial to solving the puzzle.

“My purpose was to let families have the mic and show what law enforcement has done,” Chamberlain explained to News Media. “We strive to equip the public with essential details, encouraging anyone with potentially helpful information to step forward. Many of these unresolved mysteries involve children or young individuals. As a mother of three, I often find myself feeling a profound connection, either with the missing youngsters or with the parents grappling with these tragedies.

“I genuinely think we can make a difference,” Chamberlain said. “If I can get answers for one of these families, it would be a life goal for me.”

That mission is deeply personal for Chamberlain, whose own story of survival began more than two decades ago.

On June 24, 2002, 15-year-old Chamberlain was at a friend’s home in South Carolina when Richard Evonitz, the man who would abduct her, pulled into the driveway.

“There was a moment when my captor pulled into my friend’s driveway, and I thought, ‘That’s weird,'” she recalled. “That was my intuition. But I immediately started making excuses for why he could have been there, what could have been the reason. And so, I quieted my intuition.”

It was a split-second instinct Chamberlain would soon wish she had trusted.

The stranger approached her with pamphlets and asked if her parents were home. Then, he held a gun to her neck and threatened to shoot her if she screamed. He forced Chamberlain into a dark storage container in his car.

“I’m often asked, ‘What’s the thing that we can learn from your story, Kara, to keep ourselves or our children safe?'” she said. “And the one thing that I tell people the most is there’s a great book called ‘The Gift of Fear.’ And it’s the first time that I’ve heard someone describe the way I feel, which is to listen to your intuition.”

“Essentially, what the ‘Gift of Fear’ describes is that we all have something inside of us that’s paying attention, and we’re taught to silence that intuition for the sake of being nice, not hurting someone’s feelings — lots of different reasons. And that’s something that is meant to keep us alive.”

“I hesitate to say if there’s a lesson in these cases because they’re all quite different,” she continued. “But that’s the big thing that I try to tell people — listen to your intuition and teach your children how to listen to that intuition. It is a powerful gift that everyone has, and it saves your life.”

At Evonitz’s apartment, Chamberlain was repeatedly sexually assaulted. But this time, she trusted the instinct telling her what to do: survive.

“I have to acknowledge that there was something inside of me that said, ‘Not today. Not me. I’m going to outsmart this guy,'” Chamberlain said, describing herself as “very stubborn.”

“Then, I think really the rest of it was maybe part luck,” she said. “It was also a big part of my coping mechanism… how I chose to appease my captor, which essentially is one of the lesser-known trauma responses. It’s basically playing nice to let that person put their guard down. And then, I think partially, there’s this part of him that was very arrogant, and he’d done that multiple times before. So I think all of those things played together in terms of my escape.”

For 18 hours, Chamberlain was held captive. Throughout the ordeal, she quietly memorized as many details as she could about her surroundings.

Once her captor fell asleep, she managed to free herself from her bindings and escape. Chamberlain found people sitting in a car in a parking lot and pleaded with them to take her to the police.

“Anyone who learns my story … tends to be sometimes confused by how I tell my story, which is very direct, very to the point, kind of unemotional,” she explained. “And that’s because my trauma response was to dissociate…. That enabled me to get through.”

After arriving at a police station, Chamberlain led officers back to her captor’s apartment. But when investigators arrived, Evonitz had escaped. Investigators learned Evonitz had taken Chamberlain to the apartment he shared with his wife, who was away at Walt Disney World, according to The Washington Post.

Police tracked Evonitz to Sarasota, Florida. As police closed in on him, Evonitz died by suicide. He was 38.

Evidence recovered from Evonitz’s apartment, former residences and vehicle linked him to the abductions and murders of three girls from Spotsylvania County, Virginia — Sofia Silva, 16; Kristin Lisk, 15; and her sister, Kati Lisk, 12. Notes discovered by investigators indicated that Evonitz already had his eye on other potential victims, News Media previously reported.

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Today, Chamberlain still wonders whether Evonitz had other victims.

“I genuinely believe that he was responsible for more than we know of,” she said. “But unfortunately, having taken his own life, that, at this point, is still a mystery.”

Chamberlain’s own unanswered questions have also shaped how she thinks about families who are still searching for their loved ones.

“I think the biggest misconception is that these families will be able to get closure one day,” she said of the series.

“I hear people say, ‘Let’s get these families closure’ all the time. And at the end of the day, these people are always going to have some level of trauma. If their loved ones are recovered, they’re going to look at a future where they are trying to support that person. If their loved ones are not recovered, they’re never found, or unfortunately, they’re found, and they’re deceased, then they’re looking at the rest of their lives missing someone they love.”

“That’s the biggest thing for me, closure really is a myth,” she added.

In 2010, Chamberlain completed training at the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy and began working for the Richland County Sheriff’s Department as a school resource officer, WIS-TV reported.

That experience helped Chamberlain while filming the series and speaking with families, including a grieving father.

“These people at the center of these stories are more than this story that we know,” Chamberlain explained. “They’re more than how they disappeared or what happened to them.”

“I remember thinking, ‘I have so many questions to ask this man,'” she recalled. “[I’m] looking at him and saying, ‘This is a man that’s heartbroken, who doesn’t know what happened to his daughter. He wants to talk about who she was, so I’m going to step back, and I’m going to let him do that.'”

Chamberlain said her 15-year-old self wouldn’t have been surprised by the work she does today.

“She would’ve said, ‘I knew it,'” Chamberlain said. “She would’ve known it because I think from very early on, I thought that I was able to handle what happened to me the way that I was able to handle it for a reason. Yes, I had this bad thing that happened to me, but that just became part of building who I became. That’s not who I am. It’s just a part of my story.”

Our grasp on how mammals reproduce is undergoing a dramatic transformation.

A 236-million-year-old fossil is causing experts to rethink the reproductive evolution of mammals, as detailed in a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Mammal Science.

These extraordinary fossils belong to Chiniquodon theotonicus, a species within the cynodont group — prehistoric creatures considered the precursors to modern mammals, according to findings reported by Phys.org.

For many years, the prevailing scientific belief held that these ancient relatives reproduced by laying eggs, similar to other reptiles. Yet, definitive proof of their reproduction methods remained elusive — until recent discoveries provided new insights.

Upon thorough examination of the skeletal remains of a Chiniquodon theotonicus, which roamed the Earth in the late Triassic period, researchers concluded these creatures likely gave birth to live offspring. This revelation shifts our understanding of mammalian evolution, pushing back the timeline of live birth by an astonishing 95 million years.

“It looks like some cynodonts were in fact very similar to present-day mammals,” exclaimed lead author Dr. Leandro Gaetano, a paleontologist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina.

The researchers came upon this revelation by accident while examining the bones of a fully grown C. theotonicus, and finding that they had “embryonic tissue,” Gaetano told Gizmodo.

“This is very weird, I have never seen this,” he said.

By analyzing data from living species, the scientists deduced that the mark was a neonatal line, a distinct growth ring found in bones or teeth that forms following the post-birth growth spurt.

This post-natal stretch mark gave researchers a novel idea on how to test whether cynodonts laid eggs — by comparing their body mass at birth to their adult size.

They then compared this ratio to that of several thousand species of modern birds, mammals and reptiles.

“If mammalian ancestors were egg-laying or viviparous (live birth-giving) has been considered an inscrutable mystery,” said Gaetano. “We came up with a somewhat ingenious set of methods to get at something very difficult to analyze in the fossil record.”

They found it weighed 3.7 pounds at birth and 26.5 pounds when full-grown — a 14% increase — which was most similar to the newborn-adult body mass ratio of mammals that give live birth.

These placental critters, which comprise 95% of mammals, can weigh between 17.6 pounds and 33.1 pounds as adults but give birth to babies tipping the scales at 35.5 grams and 4.1 pounds (1.87 kg), which translates to a ratio of 18.77%.

Meanwhile, bay duiker antelope of Africa weighs approximately the same as a newborn C. theotonicus. Coincidentally, relatives of this primeval species were also displaying lactation, body hair, and brain size similar to modern-day placental mammals, leading researchers to believe that this live birth adaptation could’ve emerged around the same time.

What was the advantage of giving live birth, which was previously seen as a fairly modern acquisition in the mammalian kingdom?

Senior author Adriana Mancuso, a researcher at CONICET who specializes in terrestrial ecosystem evolution, believes that the adaptation helped them adapt to a harsh environment.

“Cynodonts thrived in the Triassic, a period of recovery and restructuring of ecosystems after one of the most devastating mass extinctions in life history,” she said. “This meant high competition for resources and strong predatory pressures.”

Due to the increasingly dry conditions and seasonality, embryos of live birth-giving animals “would be better protected than those of egg-laying species,” she explained.

Researchers hope more research to shed light on whether C. theotonicus’ reproductive mechanism was an anomaly or representative of a major trend toward giving live birth among mammal ancestors.

Once, the word from Duval County prosecutors was that the testimony of Henry Tenon would take center stage—offering the most persuasive and incriminating evidence in the looming trial of Mario Fernandez.

At 38, Fernandez finds himself at the heart of an explosive trial, accused of orchestrating a chilling murder-for-hire scheme. Prosecutors contend that this plot led to the tragic shooting of Jared Bridegan, a 33-year-old Microsoft executive, in 2022. Fernandez, the current husband of Bridegan’s ex-wife Shanna Gardner, 39, faces serious charges, including first-degree murder and solicitation to commit a capital felony. Interestingly, a charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder was recently dismissed.

It has been three years since that fateful March day when Henry Tenon, once Fernandez’s tenant, confessed to pulling the trigger that ended Bridegan’s life. On that day, he admitted to ambushing Bridegan, shooting him at close range. The arrest of Fernandez followed swiftly, occurring just a day later. A grand jury turned its sights on Gardner five months after Fernandez’s arrest, indicting her due to her alleged involvement.

Authorities allege a concerted effort in the conspiracy, with Gardner supposedly orchestrating the murder after enduring prolonged litigation with Bridegan. They claim Fernandez sought out and financed Tenon, who purportedly executed the plot as the gunman. Both Gardner and Fernandez are asserting their innocence, having entered not guilty pleas in court.

Tenon, initially striking a deal, agreed to a sentence that spans from 15 years to life for his role in first-degree murder. In exchange, he offered his testimony against Fernandez and Gardner, potentially pivotal in the case against them.

The trial starts on Monday. But the jury in Jacksonville, Florida’s Duval County Circuit Court will not hear from this one-time star witness. Because Tenon has recanted amid mutterings of ‘false testimony,’ and withdrawn from the deal telling prosecutors: ‘I want a trial.’ He too has now pleaded not guilty.

And so, the man once viewed as the first domino to fall will be the last defendant tried. (Gardner’s trial is scheduled for September). But, while Tenon’s withdrawal is a blow to the prosecutors, it has not, they insist, derailed the case they are about to bring against Fernandez.

In fact, just last week the state dropped a bombshell, stating that they now have ‘overwhelming evidence’ that the gunman did not act alone. For the first time they placed two suspects at the scene of the crime.

Assistant State Attorney Alan Mizrahi said: ‘There’s a person that fled on foot, and a person that fled in a vehicle.’ A source familiar with the case told the Daily Mail: ‘I think this in the context of them dropping the conspiracy charge means they are now likely insinuating that Mario was not only part of the plot, but he was also there and present on the scene that night.’

The night in question, February 16, 2022, was Bridegan’s ‘date night’ with the two children with Gardner, twins Liam and Abby, then nine years old.

The arrangement was part of the shared custody agreement between Bridegan and Gardner that saw them split their time with the kids 50/50 in a week on/week off basis. The parent who did not have the children on any given week took them out to dinner for a Wednesday ‘date night.’

Bridegan was heading back to his second wife, Kirsten, 35, and their two children, Bexley, then two, and London, then seven-months. He was barely five minutes into his journey, less than two miles from Gardner and Fernandez’s home, when he stopped to remove a tire placed in the road on his usual route through Sanctuary Boulevard.

It was a trap, set to lure him out of his vehicle.

He was shot multiple times at close range next to the driver’s door of his Volkswagen Atlas. Bexley, strapped in her child-seat in the back of the car, witnessed it all.

The brutal crime, which took place in a quiet residential neighborhood and targeted a man who, family and friends said, had ‘no enemies’ sent shockwaves through the Florida beach town.

Kirsten, who spoke to her husband in a brief phone call just a minute before he was shot, described Bridegan as a ‘devoted father’ to all four of his children. Gardner too, it seemed, had moved on following the 2015 divorce. Bridegan remarried in 2017, Gardner one year later. 

But the Daily Mail quickly identified cracks in what seemed on first glance a picture-perfect blended family. Gardner and her children with Bridegan did not attend his funeral and instead her family held a separate memorial service some weeks later.

In a now deleted blog post, obtained by the Daily Mail, Bridegan’s former mother-in-law Shelli, 64, initially claimed that her daughter ‘and everybody who knows her,’ was ‘uninvited’ from the funeral.

She wrote: ‘After Shanna… was uninvited from Jared’s funeral services, Shanna and the twins planned their own celebration of life.’

Despite initial reports stating that Bridegan and Gardner’s divorce was amicably settled, court documents unearthed by the Daily Mail showed it was anything but and that, they had been locked in almost constant litigation for six years.

The court filings told a sorry tale of escalating tensions and increasingly vicious allegations leveled, for the most part, by Gardner against her ex-husband.

It was Gardner who filed for divorce in February 2015, after five years of marriage on the grounds that the relationship was irrevocably broken. She told the court quite simply: ‘We don’t love each other anymore.’

In her original petition she accused him of threatening to withdraw funds from their children’s trust funds which, she claimed, were in his name.

The funds were set up by Gardner’s parents, Sterling Gardner, 76, and Shelli, who are hugely wealthy after Shelli co-founded Stamp Up, a direct sales company specializing in stamps with an annual turnover of more than $100million.

Bridegan denied his ex-wife’s allegations regarding the trust funds and the issue was quickly dropped but it was the first of many shots fired in numerous filings across the years.

At the start, neither party would move out of the family home with both demanding sole use of it and so, one filing notes, the relationship between them became increasingly strained.

In the filing Bridegan accuses his then estranged wife of locking him out of the master bedroom, installing surveillance devices in the children’s bedroom and his car and speaking to him, ‘in a disparaging manner in front of the children.’

He alleged that this was all an attempt on her part to ‘drive him out of the family home…in order to attempt to gain an advantage in this custody case.’

According to public filings, their son has a congenital heart condition that required specialist treatment in New York.

In June 2015, four months after Gardner filed for divorce, Bridegan accused his ex of ‘unilaterally’ cancelling a scheduled surgery to which he was due to take the child.

He also accused her of ‘engaging in conduct during his marriage in an effort to starve [him] into submission.’

The divorce was finalized in July 2015 but by November the couple were back in court, squabbling over the terms of the custody agreement which called for a 50/50 split.

By the following May, Bridegan had taken his wife to court filing a motion accusing her of contempt and calling for the court to enforce the custody terms by which, he claimed, she was not abiding.

It was just the first of dozens of filings dominated by the issues of custody of the children, their healthcare, travel and schooling.

When Garner remarried in 2018, tensions escalated as, Gardner alleged, ‘The Father is currently insisting that the Mother’s new husband may not exercise overnight timesharing with the minor children when the Mother is away. He is additionally creating problems with the Mother’s new husband being involved on a more general basis with the minor children. However, he insists that his own new wife should be fully involved in the children’s lives.’

She branded Bridegan’s ‘interpretation’ of their custody agreement as ‘one-sided [and] dishonest.’

But if Bridegan expressed misgivings about Gardner’s new husband, he was not alone. A police report obtained by the Daily Mail shortly after Gardner and Fernandez married shows that he was the subject of an investigation into animal cruelty resulting in death.

A source who spoke to the Daily Mail on condition of anonymity explained that Fernandez was accused of shooting and killing a local cat with a BB gun.

According to the police report, the cat’s owners took it to the vet where BB gun pellets were found in its leg and abdomen.

The source said people in the neighborhood were ‘scared’ of Fernandez.

‘Mario was always having run-ins with people who fed the local strays. He was always threatening to kill them [the cats], and he had a BB gun with a scope that he said he would use on them,’ they said.

The Jacksonville Beach Police Department officer who wrote the report spoke with Fernandez at length and noted: ‘He stated that he was upset because there were people feeding stray cats…he said he had cats in his backyard, and it was making his dog bark in the middle of the night. Fernandez also said he tried putting pepper on the fence as well as shooting the cats with a BB gun.’

When the officer told him that would be considered ‘animal cruelty,’ Fernandez stated: ‘if it did not get better soon, he would take more “extreme actions.”’ The police officer noted he seemed ‘very aggravated’ during the conversation.

Fernandez was not prosecuted as police attempts to follow up with him were unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the litigation between Gardner and Bridegan dragged on through the years, with the language in the filings becoming increasingly hostile and the allegations ever more outlandish.

Gardner alleged that Bridegan was guilty of, ‘disturbing and abusive behavior’ towards their children.

In a court filing in 2020, she claimed he had been ‘regularly interrogating the minor children and recording their statements.’ She stated: ‘It also appears that the Father is actively coaching the children what to say… [and is] now threatening to use these coached recorded statements against the mother.’

These actions are, she insisted, ‘clearly abusive both emotionally and mentally and an outrageous violation of shared parental responsibility as well as basic decency.’

In the last filing entered into the record just four months before Bridegan’s violent death, Gardner accused him of caring more about humiliating her than the life of his own son.

She accused him of withholding medical equipment – an oxygen machine needed by her son for travel above a certain altitude – unless she apologized for a host of ‘transgressions.’

The court document states: ‘The Father clearly considers his vindictiveness toward the Mother far more important than protecting his son’s life.’ She claims that he put in writing, ‘that he is more concerned with humiliating the Mother than he is in making sure his own child does not die’ and described this as ‘a shocking turn of events.’

Gardner ultimately lost her action calling for sanctions against Bridegan and, in only a handful of months, an even more ‘shocking turn of events’ occurred when Bridegan’s death drew a very firm line under years of constant and increasingly hostile litigation. This, prosecutors now allege, is the backdrop to the murder-for-hire plot of which Gardner, Fernandez and Tenon now stand accused.

Fernandez, prosecutors claim, is the only link between Tenon and the victim. He wrote three checks totaling $10,000 to Tenon in the two months after the murder.

And, while Tenon initially told officers that he had no contact with his former landlord, telephone records showed 35 contacts between the men in February (the month of the murder), 30 in March and further communications between May and June.

Yet, despite confidence in their case, one close to the prosecution told the Daily Mail: ‘I know for a fact they have been trying very hard to flip Fernandez and get him to take a plea deal and testify against Shanna.

‘She’s the one they really want in all of this. As far as they’re concerned without her none of this happens.’

The Daily Mail has reached out to attorneys for all defendants.

In a swift response, Virginia police apprehended a 19-year-old man suspected of being involved in a devastating mass shooting at Virginia State University over the weekend.

The suspect, identified as Camron Harris from Henrico, Virginia, has been revealed as a non-student according to law enforcement. The violent incident on Saturday resulted in five individuals sustaining injuries, with one victim reportedly in critical condition.

While authorities have yet to disclose the identities of those injured, they did confirm that only one of the victims is enrolled at the university.

An intense manhunt extended for hours after the shooting, culminating in the arrest of Harris. He was discovered concealing himself in a closet within a dormitory on the university campus.

Police obtained felony warrants for four counts of malicious wounding and four counts of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

Harris is being held without bail at Chesterfield County Jail, according to authorities. They say he may face more charges.

The shooting itself took place early Saturday morning, while Harris was arrested hours later.

“Officers responded to the 3300 block of Boisseau Street at approximately 1:28 a.m. and discovered five individuals suffering from gunshot wounds outside VSU residence halls,” a university official told News Media.

“We recognize the concern this incident has caused among our students, parents, alumni, friends and the broader VSU community,” the university said in a statement Saturday afternoon. “VSU police will maintain an increased presence on campus as the investigation continues.

“Students should monitor their VSU email for additional safety measures currently in effect and information about available support resources,” the statement added.

A campus lockdown at VSU has since been lifted.

VSU, a state-supported historically Black university, is located in Ettrick, Virginia, about 25 miles south of Richmond.

As the new NFL season dawns, all eyes are on John Harbaugh and the revamped coaching team of the Giants in East Rutherford. It’s little wonder why, given that FanDuel Sportsbook has pegged him as the frontrunner for the NFL Coach of the Year award, with odds placed at +650.

Harbaugh, who boasts a Super Bowl win in his career, faces the formidable challenge of turning around the Giants following a bleak season. The team limped to a 4-13 record, finding themselves at the bottom of the NFC East standings.

The mission is clear: Harbaugh aims to emulate the remarkable transformation achieved by last year’s recipient, Mike Vrabel. Vrabel led his team from last in their division to clinching 14 victories and securing a Super Bowl spot.

Yet, Harbaugh isn’t the only contender for the esteemed accolade. Jesse Minter, who steps into Harbaugh’s shoes in Baltimore, is also a formidable candidate with the second-best odds at +850.

Also in the mix are Kevin Stefanski and Kellen Moore, both carrying 14/1 odds. Moore’s prospects with New Orleans are garnering attention, as many believe that Tyler Shough and the Saints pose a serious challenge for the NFC South title.

2026 NFL Coach of the Year odds

Further down the board, the Bills’ newly promoted Joe Brady and Ben Johnson of the Bears are both listed at 15/1. Brian Schottenheimer and Titans coach Robert Saleh, formerly of the Jets, each carry 16/1 prices. 

Rounding out the top ten are Klint Kubiak at 17/1 and Jim Harbaugh at 19/1, before the market truly widens with remaining candidates listed at odds of 22/1 or higher. 

Let’s dive into two names to sprinkle a wager on ahead of Week 1:

2026 NFL Coach of the Year picks

Zac Taylor, 28/1, DraftKings 

Taylor and the Bengals’ 2021 run to the Super Bowl was magical, followed by an AFC Championship appearance the following season, when they lost to the Chiefs.

Since then, the Bengals’ output has been marked by disappointment, injuries, and mediocrity defensively. 

This is the moment for Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase, as well as other offensive standouts Tee Higgins and Chase Brown, to make a major impact in the AFC North.

On defense, the additions of Dexter Lawrence, Boye Mafe and Jonathan Allen boost their line. 

With a favorable schedule that includes the Browns twice, as well as matchups against the Titans, Dolphins, and Falcons, Cincinnati is poised for a strong season.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see Taylor’s name enter the fold as a potential COTY nominee if all things go according to plan.

Betting on the NFL?

Dave Canales, 40/1, BetMGM

The Panthers secured their first NFC South division title in over a decade and ended last season with an 8-9 record.

Canales has successfully breathed new life into the franchise as Carolina certainly gave Matthew Stafford and the Rams a run for their money in a Wild Card playoff thriller, ultimately falling by one possession.

Offensive Rookie of the Year winner Tetoria McMillan provides reliable hands that have significantly accelerated the growth of Bryce Young by providing him a true go-to target. 

While the loss of second-round draft pick Nic Scourton during training camp is a blow to the defensive unit, the front office made a splash earlier this offseason by signing former Eagle Jaelan Phillips to a lucrative four-year, $120 million contract. 

The NFC South remains a wide-open race, and even with a tougher schedule, placing a small wager on Canales to further reshape the Panthers’ identity in year three at the helm is a gamble I think worth taking.

Why Trust New York Post Betting

Mike Turay is a sports journalist and editor who closely follows the NBA, NFL, college sports and UFC. He has demonstrated expertise in both NBA and NFL player prop bets for nearly three years. Mike is also highly knowledgeable about the sportsbook offer landscape, frequently trying and reviewing the latest apps and sites.