The season that ended with Cody Mancini's name on the Iron Jug is four lines long in the book: weeks one, two, six and eighteen. A hamstring took a month, his back took eleven games, a groin took the last week of the regular season, and the Hellcats played every down of their postseason without him, through to the 27-24 over the Mustaches that finished it.
He has been a Hellcat for twelve seasons, since they took him with the last pick of the first round in 2015, and in those twelve years the club has reached the final three times. A foot in the last week of the 2016 season took all three of that winter's playoff games from him, and the club lost the final 36-17; in 2020 he was concussed twice on the way to the ring he did get; this time he watched in a suit.
The seasons his body held are the ones the club spent at home. He was the league's best defensive player in 2023, and the Hellcats lost their one playoff game by a point, at home, to the Dredgers. He put up sixteen sacks in 2024 and thirteen in 2025, and neither autumn reached the bracket at all. Then they paid him $12 million for one more year — the biggest contract on the defense by four million — and got four games, three sacks and two forced fumbles, all of them in the two games he got hurt in.
When the ground had mostly emptied he walked out to the far numbers in his suit and stood there a while.
Asked where the second one sits against the first, he said, “The first one, I was tired afterwards. Not this time.” In 2020 there had been something to be tired from.
The one-year deal expired at the final whistle. Whether anybody pays a thirty-one-year-old for a thirteenth season is the spring's question.