Stackhouse became known as “Sleepy” or “Big Sleepy” to friends and teammates. The fun-loving and gregarious Stackhouse went along with it, but Howard was concerned.
She brought her son to see a doctor. Answers still proved elusive, and the finances weren’t there to dig further beneath the surface.
“The sad part about it is Nazir has been dealing with that all his life,” Howard said. “Every doctor we went to, they could never find a diagnosis. People used to put on him, ‘Oh, he’s being lazy or he’s this or he’s that,’ but that’s not the case.”
Remarkably, Stackhouse fought the disorder all the way until his freshman year at Georgia. He used little crutches and mental exercises to try keeping his attention, but sleep prevailed in meetings.
Worse yet, it happened on the sideline during Stackhouse’s first college game against Arkansas in 2020, an intimate affair in front of 16,500 in Fayetteville due to COVID-19 restrictions at the time.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart, while praising Stackhouse’s work ethic and humbleness before the NFL Draft, told the New York Times earlier this year he’d never seen a player fall asleep on the sideline before until he coached Stackhouse.
It became a real source of anxiety. With Georgia in the national limelight, Stackhouse worried about TV cameras catching him taking a catnap on the bench when the offense was on the field.
“People think I’m joking when I say this, but this is 100% true – every day his freshman year when we had a meeting, he fell asleep,” said Packers defensive lineman Warren Brinson, who was Stackhouse’s college roommate freshman year.
“It was like either the room would get quiet or when we see Nah sleeping, just clap. At Georgia, once you fall asleep a couple times, they make you do a sleep test.”
Stackhouse was diagnosed with narcolepsy, a chronic neurological disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness and involuntary sleep episodes. He also had sleep apnea, a disorder where breathing stops and starts during sleep.
There’s no cure for narcolepsy, but both Stackhouse and Howard were relieved. He still faced some trial-and-error to find the right prescription medication, but his condition finally had a name and he began using a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine while he slept.
His Georgia teammates helped him feel at ease with the diagnosis. In Green Bay, neither Brinson nor Head Coach Matt LaFleur have seen Stackhouse fall asleep once in team meetings.
“Had we not known that going into it, I don’t think you’d know it because I’ve never seen any indication of that in his time here,” LaFleur said. “He’s done a great job to mitigate the effects of that because that’s obviously a real thing –a real challenge. But it’s a credit to him and our medical staff to help him and put him in the best position possible because it hasn’t been an issue.””