CHARLOTTE — This story could have ended up so many different ways.

He could have been a first baseman, or an analytics guy, or a general manager in baseball. Or maybe an engineer, or a broadcaster, because talking might be his second-greatest skill. He was very nearly an accountant in Dallas with a cool story to tell at parties. Certainly not a football player, not after his mom hid the permission slip to keep him from playing in high school in the first place.

But JJ Jansen did eventually convince her to let him play.

So he played. And played and played and played. So much longer than anyone in his life thought was possible. That's not an insult; that's just how rare this is, and he is.

Now this weekend, Panthers long snapper JJ Jansen will have a new title — the greatest long snapper of all time.

There aren't really cool stats for his position, like there are for all the rest of them, which he knows so well. There's just continued employment, and he's about to be the king of that category.

And he laughs when he thinks about it, because the first time he really remembers thinking about people actually doing this as a job, he saw the guy he's passing this weekend.

The first time JJ Jansen laid eyes on Trey Junkin, he thought he was a cautionary tale. Now, he's about to cross paths with the long snapper of his youth again, and keep going.

As we sit here today, Jansen and Junkin are tied for 24th on the NFL's all-time games played list with 281 appearances. There are no other long snappers ahead of them, just 10 kickers, four punters, three quarterbacks, two defensive ends, one wide receiver, an offensive lineman, a cornerback, and a tight end. That's it. They've already played more football than every running back, defensive tackle, linebacker, and safety to ever do this.

So Sunday, when Jansen takes his first snap against the Eagles, he will play his 282nd career game and become the longest-serving long snapper in NFL history — bending over and throwing a football between his legs more often than any person who has ever done this in exchange for money.

In a job where there are no real stats beyond games played — as long as you succeed, you get to stay — that's the ultimate distinction.

And three decades after a kid in Phoenix watched Junkin in Sun Devil Stadium, Jansen now recognizes what a distinction that is, in ways few others can.

"I always thought it was really funny that the punter and the long snapper would warm up on first down because back then the Cardinals were terrible," Jansen said. "And so I thought that they were just getting ready for the inevitable.

"I now know, like, we scored 32 points last game and I'm still getting ready on first down for punt. Like, that's just the process."

But that's also the key: falling in love with process. Because without being willing to do the ridiculous amount of rote work it takes to repeat a fine motor skill for more than 20 years (snapping is football accounting, really), JJ Jansen wouldn't be standing here today, at the top of his unusual and unlikely field.

"I think he never got bored with it," said his former kicker and mentor John Kasay, whose Panthers record for games played Jansen broke four years ago. "I think people can easily get bored with it, and he never has, and he's done it so long now. And the way the salaries are in the NFL now, it's like, you do it as long as you possibly can.

"I mean, he's all the things that you're looking for. And he never got bored with what he did. He has always tried to refine what he's doing, to make it as easy and reproducible as possible when you're in a pressure situation."

That's it, really. Finding your thing, and doing it over and over and over until you're the best at it. As simple as that.

Of course, there's way more that goes into it than that. The athleticism required to play in the NFL means you're rare in other ways, and it always seemed like Jansen had that.

His first coach saw it, in whatever sport he played.

Rick Fitzgerald was the first to spot it, to see something in Jansen that would put him in this weekend's spotlight.

He was a teacher and a coach at Rancho Solano School in Scottsdale, Arizona, when they started a sports program. Since these were elementary school kids, it was baseball and basketball, flag football, and soccer. And in all of them, JJ Jansen had a way of standing out.

"JJ was just the most sports-loving kid I had ever known, since myself," said Fitzgerald. "He was a very gifted athlete, but he didn't quite fit the role. He was like a bigger kid, but he played quarterback ,and he played point guard ,and he played pitcher or catcher. He played whatever the most skilled position was. But more than that, I think even if he wasn't good physically, his love for sports is like no kid, person, adult before or since I have ever met. He is just a, just a sports fanatic about just teams and culture and history and statistics and, and it doesn't matter what sport you're talking about. And he's just always had a pure love for just being involved."

But lots of kids love sports. Sports are cool. There had to have been a separating quality.

"What he has is just a level of intelligence and sports intelligence that is pretty unmatched," Fitzgerald continued. "He just understands inherently how a game operates and what you're trying to do and how to do it. He's mentally playing sports chess, and everyone else is playing checkers around him. Just the level of detail and thought and adjustments he makes just to make sure he snaps it correctly is staggering, but it's just how his mind always worked.

"Like in fifth-grade basketball, he's switching on defense before I'm even able to tell him. He was playing up as the point guard on the seventh-and-eighth-grade team because he was that good, and he was bringing the ball up, and he could isolate the weakness on the other team's defense and then just exploit it. Stuff you're trying to get your starting high school varsity point guard to do; he just understood it. In a middle school baseball game, if he was pitching or he was catching, one time through the lineup, and he would know already how to work the batter, it was mind-blowing, how fast and what at like an early age he could process like the subtleties of sports."

Fitzgerald has stayed in touch with Jansen over the years, and caught up with him at Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, Calif., and in all his conversations with his former student, it's not even a football memory he talked about the most.

"He said his greatest accomplishment was when they took batting practice at the AAA stadium there, and he was the only person to hit a home run," Fitzgerald laughed.

That tracks, at a lot of levels.

Baseball was the first love, and growing up in Arizona, he had access to a lot of it. He was a spring-training batboy for the Giants (and has the photo with Will Clark to prove it) and was always near a diamond. But it was mostly about being a part of a team, and part of that culture. He also showed a knack for that part of it.

"He understood he was good at sports, but he never acted like it," Fitzgerald said. "He always tried to include other people. We were a small private school, so if you wanted to play football, you got to play football. And there's a game, and we had a little kid out in the flat who, there's no way this kid should have been on a football team, right? Like we obviously just put him on because he wanted to play, and you could almost see him calculating, if I throw this to this kid, he's going to drop it, and we're going to turn the ball over on downs, but I'm going to throw it to him anyway because he's never gotten a chance to catch a ball before.

"He was that kid so early."

"He understood he was good at sports, but he never acted like it," Fitzgerald said. "He always tried to include other people. We were a small private school, so if you wanted to play football, you got to play football. And there's a game, and we had a little kid out in the flat who, there's no way this kid should have been on a football team, right? Like we obviously just put him on because he wanted to play, and you could almost see him calculating, if I throw this to this kid, he's going to drop it, and we're going to turn the ball over on downs, but I'm going to throw it to him anyway because he's never gotten a chance to catch a ball before.

"He was that kid so early."

Of course, he was also Rick and Carla Jansen's only child, and as much as he loved sports, his mother wasn't sure about the football thing.

He didn't play in the area peewee leagues because he was on the wrong side of the weight-age curve as a kid.

"Part of my chubbier days," Jansen said with a laugh.

But once he got to Brophy High, there was a team, and he wanted to be on it because all of his buddies from the baseball team were.

His mom had a few reservations, beginning with safety. But also, she and her husband were going on vacation to Napa during football tryouts, and she didn't want to bother her sister with having to run him to practice while they were gone. So that permission slip never got signed.

"He was very upset because he obviously wanted to play," she recalled recently. "I don't know that he cared about playing football so much as playing with his friends from the baseball team."

But he found a way to be part of the team and build on his understanding of the game.

"So his freshman year, his math teacher needed a stat guy for the JV team, and I said, JJ, you should do that, because he loves stats and he loves math," she said. "And his math teacher says he never had a stat guy turn into a player; they were all the nerdy guys that didn't play sports.

"So yeah, it is a true story."

"Yeah, I was the nerd," JJ laughed.

During that year, he also took the first steps on the road that would lead him to his version of NFL glory.

His father (who passed away in 2023) had snapped in high school, so when JJ wasn't keeping stats, he started learning his craft in the backyard.

"I still remember we practiced in the same way every single time," JJ said. "We had like a square piece of grass that was probably 20 yards by 20 yards. I'd stand at one end in front of a tree that was right in the middle. My dad would stand at 15 yards away, and I would snap it.

"We'd have those legendary long nights where you're good, and then you stink, and then you're good, and you stink, and you're mad at yourself because you stink, so you yell at your dad, and he's yelling back at you and, there's this whole, you know, boys and their fathers moments."

But eventually, he started to get the hang of it, and by the time he turned 15, his mom eventually relented and let him try out for the JV team. The Brophy JVs already had a long snapper, though, a lineman named Neil Kennedy who would go on to play at Notre Dame.

"And he gave up that position so fast because he wanted nothing to do with being a long snapper," JJ said. "He did it because I'm sure he played Pop Warner since he was 5 years old. Dad was probably a coach. And so what do you do when your dad's a coach? He makes you the long snapper, right? That's both TJ Olsen and Luke Jansen. Like, if there's anybody in your family lineage that's ever long snapped, they make you a long snapper.

"But Neil gave that up. He's like, I don't want to do it. I'm done, you can have it. So I ran unopposed as a JV player."

As it turns out, Jansen was pretty good at throwing, even while upside down. So he found his niche, and he continued to work at it. By the time he got to the varsity, his coach realized it too.

Jeff Kearin had been the head coach at Cal State Northridge and was a former assistant at Southern Cal, where he worked with NFL long snapper Brad Banta.

And when he saw Jansen snap, the light went on.

"I told him, 'You're the prototypical college snapper. You could get a scholarship to college,'" Kearin recalled. "Because he could run a little bit, and he was pretty big, so he didn't get bounced around on a field goal, and so he started to try it.

"And the next thing you know, total JJ, is that it's so bloody hot in Phoenix, we're literally in what was the library of the school moving stuff around so that we could have 15 yards to snap the ball. And he insisted on working on it. I could make it legendary and say he came in every day, but he came in a lot, a lot more than most other kids. And you know, he ended up obviously being really good at it."

Jansen still preferred baseball, and tried to quit a few times, before Kearin finally broke through to him.

"I was a baseball player that was playing football to hang out with my baseball buddies," Jansen said. "But I could. I could rip it. Like I was just naturally very gifted at long snapping, and it was a job that nobody really wanted. So again, running unopposed for three years certainly helped me."

But as Kearin convinced him he could continue to do this, he started making calls to his old coaching buddies, including Mike Riley, who was coaching at Oregon State at the time. But when he mentioned this to Jansen, he said, "Well, I want to be an engineer."

"It was just such a unique recruiting dynamic, because usually you're looking to sell a kid to a school, and for him, it was more like, hey, is your school good enough for me in terms of the academic piece?" Kearin said. "I don't think he ever questioned the fact that he could step in and long snap anywhere, anytime. You're just talking about a guy who was totally committed to doing it, and he's not going to do something unless he's going to be really good at it, right? And so he made me the smartest long snapping coach in America that year because he was really good.

"He was one of those kids; if you put a field hockey stick in his hands, he'd have been good at that. So to have an athlete like that be your long snapper is just, it's so good. So many guys think they can do it; the quarterbacks can't bend over, and they can't follow through, and they can't kick back while they're snapping; it's rubbing your belly and patting your head. But JJ never flinched at any of that."

Kearin's coached a lot of kids in his day, and it's hard to keep track of all of them. But he remembered listening to NPR in February of 2016 as he drove to work, and he heard Jansen's name during a report from Super Bowl 50.

"I come home to my wife, and I'm like, 'Becky, JJ Jansen is still flipping playing. He's got to be 50 years old. And it was shocking."

That was 11 years ago. JJ Jansen's still shocking people.

It wasn't that Kearin didn't think he could do it; he did. But the average NFL career is less than four years, so it was statistically unlikely that he'd still be doing it through the 2015 season.

But at every juncture, Jansen kept finding believers.

He just wasn't always one of them, and when he saw a picture from his freshman year at Notre Dame, he laughed and said: "That's what $40,000 of tuition looks like."

"I never had really lifted weights, had never really been a football guy," Jansen said. "So there was a senior named Casey Dunn, who's a good snapper, also walked on, went on to be a doctor, super smart guy, great mentor, and in the first like week of training camp, I was beating him out. Like I was going to be the starting snapper, and then we had to start blocking people. And the first time we had to block people, I snapped a ball, perfect snap. And the guy ran right past me. And the second snap, I stoned the guy, and I sent the ball 15 feet over the punter's head. And that sent me on an 18-month mission to learn how to snap while blocking.

"It was the greatest 18 months of my life, and I hated every minute of it. As these things often go in hindsight, it was the greatest 18 months of my life, and I wanted to quit football almost every day because it was so demoralizing. I was so broken, but you go through these really hard times, and now at 40 years old, I can still do it, and I'm pretty good at it. Again, not flawless by any stretch, but I can still do it because I had to learn how to do it back when I was 19 years old."

Once Dunn left, Jansen's path was blocked by Scott Raridon (whose son Eli was just drafted by the Patriots; that's how long we're talking). But by the end of that season, having learned the hard way that he had to block, he got his first start.

Against No. 1 Southern Cal, of the loaded Reggie Bush era.

"On the first punt rush that I ever saw were Brian Cushing, Keith Rivers, and their fourth linebacker was a walk-on that no one ever heard of by the name of Clay Matthews," Jansen laughed. "So, you know, welcome to it."

People around him, however, were starting to realize that Jansen was holding his own.

Charlie Weis knew. With a long career in the NFL before he walked into the Notre Dame job, Weis had seen what an NFL snapper looked like, and was convinced Jansen could become one. But just like Jansen's high school coach before him, it took insisting.

"He had no clue that he was good enough to play in the NFL. Absolutely zero," Weis said with a laugh. "When I got there, the furthest thing from his mind was playing pro football. And after the first day I saw him long snap, I knew. I said, JJ, you don't understand, you don't need to be the biggest guy to be a long snapper in the NFL, but you have everything. You're a dynamic snapper. You got zip on the ball. You're smart, you care, you give effort, and you're good enough in protection, and you run down the field good enough. I go, you could play longer than any one of these guys over here. And he looked at me like I was in a fantasy world. Seriously, the look he gave me, he looked at me like I was delusional."

Weis was a prophet, as it turns out. Come Sunday, Jansen will have played longer than any of the long snappers, and all but 23 human beings in the history of pro football. But at the time, that was a wild thought.

"But then I think I put, I planted a seed in his mind, or maybe he was good enough," Weis said. "You never know how things are going to work out. But I knew what a long, a good long snapper looked like, and he looked like, and he looked like him."

The things Weis saw were the same things Fitzgerald and Kearin saw, beyond the physical attributes, the kind of people skills that have seen Jansen become a four-time captain here, at one of the least-heralded positions on the field.

"Besides his physical attributes, the two major things he had going for him were his intelligence and how much he cared," Weis said. "Those two things were really, really important to him. He was a leader on special teams. He wasn't just a long snapper. He was a leader, and even back then, he was like a sponge, and he had great leadership."

Having learned under old-school NFL coaches like Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick, Weis knew that for any of this to work, the practices had to be harder than the games. And that's where he saw Jansen shine, beyond the six or seven times a game he'd perform his particular skill. That included studying the weather and learning how wind patterns changed his job depending on the direction they were going.

"Everyone should practice like it's a game, and that's how he practiced," Weis said. "And when other people didn't practice like that, he would let them know that's not the way we do things around here.

"And there's a big difference between intelligence and football intelligence. I've had some really smart classroom guys that were really dumb players. I've had some really dumb players that have been really good on the field, football intelligence-wise. Fortunately for JJ, he always had both. He was always smart in the classroom and on the field, which makes it easier to do the things you're talking about. And he never had a big ego, ever."

But still, Jansen wasn't convinced, so Weis made a call to Phoenix to tell Rick and Carla Jansen what they needed to prepare for.

"Charlie asked us to come in because he thought JJ needed an agent, and we're thinking, yeah, that's a pipe dream," his mother said. "I just wanted JJ to get his accounting degree and get a job because you don't want to send this kid to school, . . . I mean, every kid wants to be a baseball player or a football player, and the reality is, it just doesn't work,

"And I'm thinking, get a job and make sure you have a job. But when he was signed by Green Bay, I never thought that it would amount to anything. I just wanted him to have a job."

His mom wasn't the only one.

His girlfriend at the time figured the football thing had run its course at Notre Dame, so she was with JJ's mom with all this agent talk. In fact, Laura and JJ had each found accounting jobs in the Dallas area, and she had never really thought of him as a football player anyway.

"When I first met him, we were 17, so I met a first baseman," Laura said. "I thought he was real cute on the baseball field, and then when we were at separate colleges, so when we were talking seriously about what does this look like going forward, we both took accounting jobs in the DFW area.

"So I was going to marry an accountant and live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and we thought that when coach Weis convinced him to just enter the draft, we thought, 'What a cool, fun story you'll have to tell at cocktail parties for the rest of your life, that you went to training camp with the Green Bay Packers.' So no, neither one of us thought this was anything more than just a cool story."

The Packers part didn't exactly work out; he spent his rookie year on injured reserve, but they hung onto him long enough to trade him to the Panthers in 2009. And even then, the women in his life weren't sure how long this could last.

"I think every year we thought, hold on as tight as you can because this is probably it," Laura said, when asked how long she thought it would last.

But it lasted for reasons.

"It's probably twofold," she continued. "It's 100 percent God's kindness, and he has left him in this for mentoring, and I think he's been super impactful with a lot of guys outside the locker room as well as inside the locker room.

"And JJ is just so committed to whatever he does. He's never satisfied with good enough. He's spent the last 20 years trying to get better and never really feeling like he's made it, always trying to pull more out of it, do better, prove to himself that he can keep getting better, and I think that's served him well."

But landing in Charlotte also put him in the path of Kasay, who would shape his career and his family's future in so many ways (not the least of which was Jansen buying Kasay's house, where he lives to this day).

And as it turns out, Kasay knew about professional long snappers, because before he came to the Panthers, he landed in Seattle with a guy named, ... wait for it, ... Trey Junkin.

Kasay laughed at the coincidence that these two men are tied at anything this week, because they don't have a lot in common. Junkin also played tight end, coming up in an era when snapping was a side hustle rather than a specialty.

"Trey was the quintessential Oakland Raider," Kasay said. "That bravado was very much him. He drove a Harley-Davidson, he was into that stuff, he wore the headbands and everything."

Kasay hasn't kept up with Junkin (few seem to have, and efforts to reach him the last two weeks were unsuccessful), but laughed and noted that his first snapper's wild side and his last snapper's accountant persona couldn't have been more different.

"You remember the old WCW Wrestling, when the masked bad guy would be from Parts Unknown?" Kasay said. "I think that would be the best way to describe where Trey came from and where Trey has gone since."

But the lessons Kasay learned from Junkin, and would eventually pass along to Jansen, were about the pressure of every play and the need to be perfect on all of them. Kasay said Junkin got more nervous about long field goals than short ones, even in practice, but Kasay reminded him that the 8 yards he had to snap it were the same whether he was kicking from 30 or 50.

"And he goes, yeah, but I know how important it is because I've got to be perfect to give you the best chance to do what it is that you were doing," Kasay said. "And so he was always nervous, and we would laugh about it cause it's like, bro, it's the same thing every time.

"But he understood; he'd been in the league long enough to understand. That one little mistake in one little situation can have catastrophic consequences to a very large group of people. I mean, there's a reason why he did it for as long as he did because he was, he was really good at what he did, right?"

That's one of the things that Jansen and Junkin share, but not the only one.

"So this thing that everyone picks up on me that knows me now is that I always drop a ball and pin it between my feet," Jansen said. "So if you watched me for 5 minutes on the sideline, I always drop the ball, pin it between my feet. I picked that up from Trey Junkin. I watched Trey Junkin do that for years on the sideline, drop the ball, pin it between your feet so you didn't have to always bend over. It became a little like a bar trick to add to the other list of bar tricks that I'm capable of performing.

"I don't have that many bar tricks. I'm good at arguing with officials. I can snap. I can pin a football between my feet, and I know all the proper verbiage during coin tosses. That might be the limitation of it, but those are, for a football player, that's those are four pretty good skill sets."

He left out the most important one.

He's lasted.​

He's hit a lot of the milestones already. He broke Kasay's Panthers franchise record for games played. He's kept playing past the age of 40, which few people do. So this latest one, even though it puts him at the top of his profession all time, is met with a grin and a shrug.

He's proud of his accomplishments, sure. But he also knows he's a small part of a bigger picture.

"This isn't going to shock you, but I don't really care to think about it all that much," Jansen said of the record. "I mean, it's cool. As I've told you many times before, I never thought I'd play this long. I still feel very young.

"Unfortunately, with each passing year, I get more and more other snappers saying, 'Oh man, I watched you growing up,' 'Oh man, I always wanted to be you.' And it's just gross, but I'm getting more of it now."

But that's how it works with role models. You hang around long enough, and people start to pick up on your tricks. Maybe one day those kids will drop a ball between their feet to trap it, and say they learned it from JJ Jansen.

But unless they commit to doing all the much harder stuff the way he has, they might never come close to matching his greatest skill.

It takes a lot of work to last. Especially if you want to be first.