When your dad’s got three Super Bowl rings and your mom’s a soccer star turned podcast queen, you know you’re destined for greatness. Christian McCaffrey’s parents, Ed and Lisa McCaffrey, didn’t just raise a star running back—they built a football dynasty with roots as deep as the NFL playbooks McCaffrey’s father once studied.

Ed McCaffrey, a Stanford alum and former wide receiver, was the man with hands as reliable as a two-minute drill. At 6’5″, Ed snagged passes like it was his 9-to-5 (which, let’s be real, it was). He stacked up over 7,000 receiving yards and 55 touchdowns with the Giants, 49ers, and Broncos—plus, he grabbed three Super Bowl rings. He even gave coaching a shot at Northern Colorado, but after a 6-16 run, they parted ways.

Lisa McCaffrey, meanwhile, wasn’t just sitting on the sidelines. A standout soccer player at Stanford, she graced magazine covers as the next big thing on-field. And with her father, Olympic sprinter Dave Sime, in her corner, Lisa’s love for sports was practically a given. She even passed on a Vanderbilt scholarship to ball out at Stanford instead. Now, she’s co-hosting Your Mom, a podcast where she dishes on the highs and lows of raising an NFL star. “It has made me miss and reminisce about those times when my kids were little—the good, and bad, too,” she shared with The Athletic.

By 1992, she and Ed tied the knot, kicking off a family all about athletic greatness. They’ve got four boys—Max, Christian, Dylan, and Luke—who definitely didn’t miss out on those star genes. Lisa knew from day one that she was destined to be a boy mom. “I just had an inkling, an intuition,” she told NBC Sports Bay Area, and boy, was she right! The McCaffrey boys have football running through their veins.

Growing up under the shadow of a football legend wasn’t always easy for the Niners’ star running back, but it lit a fire in him and his brothers to carve their own paths. “We were always Ed’s sons, and so in a way, that was an advantage for us because we got to experience a little bit of that already,” McCaffrey told NBC Sports in 2023. Lisa and Ed always knew their son was destined for greatness. “He put everything he had in whatever he was doing,” Lisa said in 2015.

In Feb, Ed and Lisa saw McCaffrey shine in his Super Bowl debut with San Fran, scoring a clutch TD. Though the Niners missed the trophy, the 28-year-old play sealed the McCaffrey legacy. From Stanford’s fields to NFL stardom, the McCaffrey bros are building a dynasty, one epic play at a time.

Meet the McCaffrey brothers 

Growing up in the McCaffrey home meant chasing dreams—whether on-field or in the classroom.

The eldest McCaffrey Max tried his hand at the NFL as a WR with the Oakland Raiders in 2016. Though undrafted and later cut, he pivoted to coaching at the University of Northern Colorado in 2020 and snagged an offensive assistant role with Miami last year. Dylan, the middle McCaffrey, caught the football bug too. He threw passes as a QB at Michigan, then moved to Northern Colorado, where the family pretty much seemed to have set up base. Luke, the youngest, switched from QB to WR after transferring from Nebraska to Rice University.

Despite their athletic prowess, Ed and Lisa never pushed their kids into sports. Lisa spilled the beans: “Who knows if they’re going to be talented or not…I want them to be involved in what they love.” And love they did. Christian McCaffrey (the second oldest) was so eager to play that he was begging to start at age 7 (though he had to wait). “You saw him work, and it made you want to work just as hard,” the mum of four asserted.

The McCaffrey bros didn’t just inherit talent—they picked up a killer work ethic. Every snap, pass, and catch proves that passion is their true playbook!