Bernie Kosar was the quarterback who dragged the Cleveland Browns back into relevance in the mid-1980s. From 1985 to 1989, he led Cleveland to five straight playoff appearances and three AFC Championship Games, turning the Browns into a legitimate contender again. One of those runs ended with the infamous “The Drive,” when John Elway led Denver 98 yards to force overtime in the 1986 AFC Championship Game before the Browns lost 23-20.
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But decades after carrying Cleveland through its comeback years, Kosar found himself fighting for his own comeback. In 2024, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson’s disease, eventually undergoing a liver transplant in November 2025. Now, months into that recovery, the 62-year-old Browns legend has once again concerned fans after sharing another update from University Hospitals while undergoing bloodwork.
“Enjoying my Monday morning at University Hospital, despite yesterday’s outcome, getting my cranium inflated while waiting for some bloodwork. Still representing our team! Have a winning day & week 🏈 #UMatter #Dawgpound,” he wrote on Instagram on September 14.
Although Kosar publicly revealed his liver battle in July 2024, the warning signs had been there long before the announcement. He said he had dealt with unexplained liver-related issues for years before doctors eventually diagnosed him with cirrhosis roughly 16 months earlier. By late 2023, the condition had become much harder to ignore.
“My body gave out on me,” Kosar recalled of attending a Browns home game against the New York Jets in December 2023. “I really felt like I wasn’t going to make it home from the Jets game. I sucked it up, though, and continued to avoid the doctors until the new year. Then I went into the hospital and got a massive blood transfusion. It was like: ‘How are you alive? How are you moving? Because your hemoglobin levels are so low.'”
That was only the beginning of a much longer health battle. Kosar later became sick again while traveling to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl and spent several days hospitalized. By July 2024, he said he had spent roughly 40 to 50 nights in hospitals over the previous seven months and undergone around 20 to 25 procedures or surgeries. His condition eventually became serious enough for doctors to place him on the liver transplant list.
More than a year after being placed on the transplant list, Kosar finally received a new liver in November 2025.
But the surgery did not end his health battle. In January 2026, routine bloodwork showed signs of what Kosar described as a “small rejection” of the transplanted liver, sending him back to the hospital for treatment.
“So I’m back in here, IV’d up, trying to get my body here to accept this new liver, this new gift, so I can get on to have an awesome, positive 2026,” Kosar said.
Kosar spent nine seasons in Cleveland, finishing his Browns career with 21,904 passing yards and 116 touchdown passes. He never delivered the Super Bowl the city desperately wanted, but decades later, his connection with Cleveland would take on a meaning far beyond football.
What Kosar could never have imagined was that another Browns fan would eventually help save his life.
After two previous transplant possibilities fell through, 21-year-old Bryce Dunlap suffered an anoxic brain injury in November 2025. He was placed on a ventilator, but doctors eventually told his family he would not survive. His parents then decided to donate his organs.
“I was tempered in my hope that it was going to happen,” Kosar said on the Sage Steele podcast. “So, I didn’t get nervous this time because the first two times that I thought it was going to happen, it didn’t materialize. So I was more nervous, hoping, am I going to do it? Then I started hearing some stories of the Dunlap family, and the kind of emotion of hearing about a 21-year-old young man. I didn’t even piece it together because that was on the news and stuff for that. So to be able to kind of start seeing that, and then thinking that’s probably for what they’re waiting for me. It was, I want to say excitement, but it was actually real depression for thinking about someone else’s loss on the other side of that.”
Kosar later learned that Bryce, a devoted Browns fan, was indeed the donor whose liver he had received.
Since the transplant, Kosar has stayed close to the Dunlap family. In May, he honored Bryce on what would have been his birthday with a tribute on Instagram.
The Browns also honored Bryce’s family before a home game in December 2025. His mother took part in the Dawg Pound tradition by smashing a guitar in front of the crowd while wearing a jersey with Kosar’s number and her late son’s name on the back.