Braxton Berrios, the All-Pro Returner the Giants Also Keep as Their Emergency Quarterback

Braxton Berrios

Photo: Front Office Sports / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 6, 1995 Raleigh
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Super Bowl
Individual awards	AFC Special Teams Player of the Week · First-team All-Pro kick returner · Super Bowl LIII champion

Every NFL roster carries a player whose worth is measured in field position and insurance. For the New York Giants this autumn, that player is Braxton Berrios: the man fielding kickoffs, the wide receiver who ran a dozen routes in three games without drawing a target and, since Jaxson Dart went down seven plays into a Monday night in Los Angeles, the emergency third quarterback. “Everybody always talks about, ‘One snap away, one snap away,’ and I was one snap away,” he told Art Stapleton of NorthJersey.com.

The line lands as a joke, but it also describes the whole career. Berrios has been drafted in the sixth round, put on injured reserve before his first game, waived, claimed, named a first-team All-Pro, paid, released, rebuilt from a torn ACL and cut again at the end of a training camp. What keeps bringing him back is that coaches keep finding one more job he can do, and the quarterback job is the oldest one on his list.

Raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he was born on October 6, 1995, Berrios was a dual-threat quarterback and receiver at Leesville Road High School. He took over under center as a sophomore when his older brother was injured, returned to the position as a senior and finished his varsity career with 5,666 yards of total offense and 82 touchdowns. The school retired his No. 8. His own verdict on those years is unsentimental: “I was definitely more of an athlete playing quarterback than a quarterback.” He is of Puerto Rican descent through his paternal grandfather.

A four-star recruit, he picked the Miami Hurricanes over offers from Ohio State, Clemson and Oregon, and played as a true freshman. Over four seasons in Coral Gables he caught 100 passes for 1,175 yards and 14 touchdowns and returned 47 punts, one of them for a score. His senior year was his best, with 55 receptions, 679 yards and nine touchdowns, two of them in Tallahassee in the game that gave Miami its first win over Florida State since 2009.

The New England Patriots took him with the 210th pick of the 2018 draft and placed him on injured reserve before the season began. He never played a down for them, yet he received a ring when the Patriots won Super Bowl LIII, and he was waived at the final cuts a year later. The New York Jets claimed him two days after that. His first professional touchdown came on a 30-yard pass from Sam Darnold; his second was thrown by another receiver, Jamison Crowder, on a 43-yard trick play against the Cleveland Browns.

The Jets season that made his name was 2021. Against the Jacksonville Jaguars he took a second-quarter kickoff 102 yards for a touchdown, a return that put the Jets ahead for good and earned him AFC Special Teams Player of the Week. A week later he caught a touchdown and ran for another in the same game, the first Jets receiver to do both. He finished with 46 catches for 431 yards, led the league with 30.4 yards per kickoff return, averaged 13.4 yards on punts and was voted first-team All-Pro as a kick returner.

The contract that followed is where the story gets less tidy. In March 2022 the Jets re-signed him for two years and $12 million, a price that treated one exceptional season on special teams as a floor. It was closer to a ceiling. In 2022 he gained 145 receiving yards without a receiving touchdown, and his judgment on when to fair-catch a punt, and when to let it roll, left too many Jets drives starting deep in their own territory. The season’s most replayed moment was a two-yard touchdown pass he threw to quarterback Zach Wilson. New York released him in March 2023 with a year left on the deal, saving around $5 million in cap space. In the same period his relationship with social media personality Alix Earle, which lasted from 2023 until the couple announced their split in December 2025, put his name in front of an audience that had never watched a punt return, and for a while it was the version of Berrios most people knew.

The Miami Dolphins signed him a week after the Jets let him go. He played 16 games in 2023, catching 27 passes for 238 yards and a touchdown, and re-signed for 2024, but he tore his ACL in a Week 7 loss to the Indianapolis Colts and the season ended after six appearances. The Houston Texans gave him a one-year deal for 2025; a hamstring injury kept him out of the opener against the Los Angeles Rams, and he appeared in four games before reaching free agency again. By then his career totals stood at 140 catches, 1,360 receiving yards, 100 punt returns and 91 kickoff returns.

The Giants signed him on June 1, 2026, after a workout, released him at the August 30 cutdown and brought him straight back to the practice squad. He was elevated for all three of the season’s opening games, the maximum the rules allow, and returned five kickoffs for 138 yards as John Harbaugh’s team went 2-1. When Dart’s knee injury moved Jameis Winston into the starting job, the staff told Berrios he was next in line behind him; Harbaugh conceded they had only “briefly talked about” that scenario before the season. On September 29, with his elevations used up, the Giants signed him to the 53-man roster alongside fellow returner Charlie Jones and parted ways with Odell Beckham Jr.

His first game as a full member of the roster is set for October 4, against the Arizona Cardinals at MetLife Stadium, two days before his 31st birthday. The job description is the same as it has been for most of his career: take the kick, hold on to the ball, and be ready for whatever else the depth chart asks.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football, New York Giants, Jaxson Dart, Braxton Berrios, Miami Hurricanes, New York Jets