NFL Wide Receiver Braylon Edwards Pays $790K For Students' College Tuition

 by Brandon Sneed

Braylon Edwards/ESPN

Seventy-nine kids at 22 colleges across the country are there because of Braylon Edwards, a wide receiver for the San Fransisco 49ers. When he was a rookie with the Cleveland Browns in 2005, Edwards promised 100 eighth-graders in the city that if they maintained a 2.5 grade-point average, served 15 hours community service, and made it into a college, he'd give them $10,000 to put toward their education. 

Seventy-nine of them did it. Some of them even made it into Harvard, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. 

The offer stemmed from an Advance 100 program Edwards and his mother created as a way to help people out. On top of giving the students the $10,000, Edwards also bought them laptops and some other supplies. 

And, as Rick Reilly pointed out in his interview with Edwards on ESPN (video below), the gift is basically maxing out Edwards' salary of $1 million this year. 

And hey, big points to Edwards for going through with it, unlike another well-meaning but not-quite-so-financially-well-off humanitarian dreamer we all know and (mostly) love: