STANFORD - Davis Warren’s football career has been shaped by a kind of pressure that has nothing to do with third downs or red-zone possessions.
On Friday night, when Stanford hosts N.C. State, the sixth-year senior will line up for another game in a season where he has started every contest for the Cardinal. He’s also one of nine FBS quarterbacks with at least 200 passing attempts and two or fewer interceptions, and he’s helping Stanford chase its first bowl appearance in eight years.
But none of that compares to the battle Warren faced as a teenager, when a workout in Southern California turned into a life-changing diagnosis.
In March 2019, Warren showed up expecting a normal day in the gym. Instead, he suddenly couldn’t even lift a warmup weight.
At first, he thought it was just a seasonal illness and figured it would pass. Online searches pointed him toward something more alarming, but he pushed that idea aside and assumed it was more likely to be something like mononucleosis.
Blood tests at an urgent care clinic raised enough concern that he was sent to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, about an hour away. There, Warren learned he had acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
He didn’t have much familiarity with the disease, and cancer was not something that had touched his family in any major way. What he did know terrified him.
“The only thing I associated with cancer was death,” Warren said.
The treatment was hard on his body, but the mental strain hit even harder. In those early days, the questions went far beyond whether he would get back to football. He wondered whether he would survive, whether he would return to the things he loved and whether he would still feel like himself.
Warren went through four rounds of chemotherapy, and his body responded well enough that he did not need a bone marrow transplant.
Eventually, football became part of his road back, though it didn’t come in a straight line. After treatment, he joined Michigan as a walk-on under former Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh. Following Michigan’s 2023 national championship, Warren won the starting job and played in nine games, throwing for 1,199 yards and seven touchdowns.
Then came another blow: he tore his ACL in Michigan’s victory over Alabama in the 2024 ReliaQuest Bowl, which kept him out of the 2025 season. He transferred to Stanford that winter and began a new chapter in a career that has already taken plenty of unexpected turns.
For a long time, Warren tried not to let his cancer experience define him.
“I wanted to be anything but a kid with cancer,” he said. “I just wanted to be Davis.”
That outlook shifted as he found success on the field. Warren came to understand that telling his story could help children facing the same fear and uncertainty he once lived through. It also gave him a way to process what he had been through himself.
The lessons from leukemia, the fight to win a job at Michigan and the setbacks that come with playing quarterback have all sharpened his sense of resilience. They also changed how he sees the position.
A quarterback has to take a hit, shake off a mistake and get ready for the next snap. Warren learned long before arriving at Stanford that he can’t control everything around him - only his response.
That same mindset continues to carry him now, both in football and beyond it. Through hospital visits, including time with young patients at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, Warren has tried to give encouragement to children dealing with their own difficult fights.
“It just inspires me to keep pushing and never to give up,” Warren said.