How Colts' CB Sauce Gardner Became 1 Year Younger Overnight

The Indianapolis Colts traded for superstar cornerback Sauce Gardner at last season's trade deadline, a blockbuster move that required a haul for his services.

The Colts dished out a 2026 first-round pick, a 2027 first-round pick, and wide receiver Adonai Mitchell to land Gardner, but they were happy to do so if it meant they'd be bringing in a certified lockdown corner who had recently inked a 4-year extension.

With Gardner being locked down for nearly half a decade as he enters his prime, the Colts were more than willing to pay up.

Gardner will be 25 years old by the time the 2026-27 regular season arrives, not 26. His official birthdate is August 31, 2001, but unless you were visiting the Indianapolis Colts' or the NFL's official website, you would have been led to believe that he's a year older than he actually is.

“I’m 24!” Gardner said on the last day of Colts minicamp, laughing as he shook his head. “It’s crazy that I’m even being asked this.”

Why is this even a question four seasons into his NFL career? Gardner himself has no idea, but he recently set the record straight during his media availability on the Colts' last day of veteran minicamp, and The Athletic's James Boyd took a deep dive into how this all came to be.

Sauce's Mystery Date

Some of the most reputable sports resources, such as ESPN and Sports Reference, have listed Gardner's birth year as 2000 since he joined the league. These avenues likely spread such misinformation to the older generations, but even the younger NFL fans who frequent EA Sports' Madden video game series have also been led astray.

“It’s wrong in Madden, too? That’s crazy because I never checked,” Gardner told The Athletic. “Because when it comes to the paperwork and everything I’ve signed, it all says ’01. So, I don’t know where or how it got messed up unless people just get it straight from Google.”

This confusion led to Wikipedia doing most of the damage when it comes to spreading misinformation about Gardner's age. Although we've all been taught not to take Wikipedia at face value, given its easy access to spreading any information, it remains a solid resource for the less trivial of facts.

Even though Wikipedia (and soon to be others) has since fixed the error in question, it doesn't just undo years of conditioning. There will still be people who didn't see the news and will assume that Gardner is a year older than he is, and this is concerning for multiple reasons.

“You can’t believe everything you see on the internet,” Gardner said. “You just can’t.”

NBA players Buddy Hield and Jake LaRavia are two similar examples of poor reporting gone wrong.

As for Hield, his mix-up was revealed during his third season in the league when he was still with the Sacramento Kings. After publicly celebrating his 26th birthday, the investigators were tipped off.

Hield was listed as 25 years old on both the Kings' and the NBA's official websites, and even though this inverse example of Gardner's likely affected how he was viewed moving forward, his role as a 3-point shooter meant he had plenty of his prime left. This aspect was a bit more important for Gardner to clarify, as one year in cornerback life could mean the difference between a future contract.

For Jake LaRavia, his case of birthday misinformation on the internet affected him most.

The former Wake Forest product was listed as 22 years old on most prominent scouting sites and media outlets, when in reality he was just 20, but after he and his agent worked quickly to remedy the situation, LaRavia was soon thereafter flying up draft boards.

LaRavia was ultimately drafted with the 19th overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft, so it didn't permanently knock his draft stock, but it was still one of the bigger examples in recent memory of an incorrect birthday doing more harm than good.

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