At first glance, the three symmetrical and impossibly deep scratches that had been clawed down the side of Jacobbi McDaniel's helmet did not seem to be of human origin.

That's what made me stop and stare on Monday afternoon when the Cleveland Browns 300-pound rookie defensive lineman tweeted out a picture of the mangled orange polycarbonate blob that used to be his helmet after his debut performance in the NFL trenches Sunday in Jacksonville.

On Monday, after a film study session back in Cleveland, McDaniel, an undrafted free agent from Florida State, learned that despite his solid performance against the Jags, he was headed back to the obscurity of the Browns' practice squad. He returned to his locker that afternoon, bummed and feeling a bit nostalgic when he glanced down at his helmet and realized it contained a perfectly preserved hieroglyphic record of his first NFL game in the form of the bizarre but revealing pattern of scuffs, scrapes, gouges, tears and dents left behind from the game.

Jacobbi McDaniel faced the Lions in the preseason but didn't make his official debut until Week 7. AP Photo/Rick Osentoski

All in all, I counted 15 different marks of every shape, size, depth and direction, including: a horizontal tear on the gray facemask; a thick, weird smudge near the right temple; two long tire skid marks that dead end into a deep tear of the brown stripe decal that runs down the center of the helmet; a cavernous divot of plastic near the Browns nameplate; a shooting-star gash above the right eye that looked like the work of an expressionist painter; and on and on and on. And when you begin to think about the shear amount of force, torque and close-quarter violence needed to carve such a strange script into such a strong material, McDaniel's helmet becomes almost mesmerizing, like an orange crystal ball.

Ultimately, though, it was those other-worldly Freddy Krueger-like claw marks down the right front side of the helmet -- the ones that reminded me of the equipment guy in Green Bay, who said that after good games Clay Matthews' helmet looks like it had been attacked by a rabid pack of bobcats -- that spurred me to track down McDaniel. Turns out, the guy with a 2013 criminology degree from FSU was just as fascinated as I was by the football forensics left behind on his helmet. Really, that's why he tweeted out a picture of his helmet. It tells a story. His story.

So together, along with the game film, we tried to use the marks like a map to retrace the experience of what it's like to enter and survive the NFL trenches for the very first time.

Of course, being the professional that I am, I had barely made it through my initial hellos before blurting out: "The scratch marks, dude. Have you seen 'em?"

"I'm just seeing that now, too, yeah -- whoa," he replied.

"Looks like human fingernails!" I practically yelled. "Or like a cat or something attacked you. Are those fingernails? I swear I think they're fingernails!"

"Fingernails? Naw, I don't think so," McDaniel said, laughing. "I mean, hopefully. If someone has fingernails that strong, whoa."

Me, calming down a bit, finally: "OK, is it a cleat?"

Him: "Naw, man, ain't nobody step on my head."

Me: "Well, maybe it's a corner of a facemask or something. We gotta try and find out what or who or how those marks got there."

McDaniel, kindly ignoring my poor grammar: "Mostly, that's just work, man. Me coming off the ball, knocking heads, doing what I'm supposed to do. When I'm out there, that's my goal. I'm trying to wreak havoc, trying to cause damage. The trenches in the NFL, it's one dangerous place. That's for grown men only. I've never seen my helmet look like this after a game, to be honest. When I first looked at it, I was like, 'Wow, damn.' But it does look good, doesn't it?"

"Naw man, I don't worry about my brain. That helmet shows I went out there and did my job. That's all."

As far as I can tell, McDaniel's helmet was perfectly clean for less than one second of his NFL career. To start their third series, the Jags ran off tackle to McDaniel's side, and within a split second of the snap, left guard Zane Beadles' helmet collides and scrapes across the left temple of McDaniel's helmet. Tackle Luke Joeckel then comes in to seal off McDaniel from the runner, and at one point there are eight players packed within 2 yards of McDaniel. "Most of the time you have two or three offensive linemen coming up on you," McDaniel said. "You got a bunch of guys, all 300 pounds-plus, and they're all going at it full speed in a short, small distance. It feels and sounds like a car crash in there, or worse."

The very next play you see why McDaniel has marks all over his helmet and not just on one side or the other. On second down, he switches to the left side of the Browns' injury-depleted defense, where he immediately butts heads with 6-foot-6 rookie guard Brandon Linder. McDaniel is 6-foot, and the difference in height causes the top of his forehead to grind right into Linder's black facemask, leaving the crisscross slashes on the white tape of the helmet. "At first I wasn't coming off the ball hard enough," McDaniel said. "You can't sit in there and wait on anybody. You gotta initiate the punch. You gotta be the hammer and not the nail."

McDaniel struggled for most of his first series, and beyond, but later in this drive he started to get his feet under him, tearing his facemask after meeting center Luke Bowanko low and face to face. "That mark right there is a good thing," McDaniel said. "When you come up onto an offensive lineman, that lets you know that you're leading with your face and not the top or the crown of your head or anything like that."

The closer you look at the Jags' helmets, the easier it is to understand some of the more random and unexplained marks on McDaniel's helmet, like the deep gouge to the right of the Browns nameplate. The dark marks all come from the black gunmetal-type paint and finish, the black facemasks and the black decals on the Jags' redesigned helmets. What's more, NFL chin straps and facemasks are secured with metal buckles and screws and bulky plastic knobs. They do a lot of damage. Also, from straight ahead, the facemasks look smooth, flat and rounded. But if you look down from above the helmet you'll see that they're actually made up of a series of rubber-coated metal bars that, especially in the corners, form a series of jagged, claw-like ridges.

The helmet McDaniel wore against the Jaguars, which he immortalized in this tweeted photo, has seen better days. Courtesy Jacobbi McDaniel

Yet even with a better understanding of what made all these marks, it's still impossible to look at McDaniel's hacked-up helmet and not think, "If the outside is that mangled, what's happening to the inside?" Listen, I'm as enthralled and addicted to the violent entertainment of football as anyone, but I just wonder, in this day and age, about glorifying what McDaniel described in his tweet as the whole "#headbuster" thing. "Naw man, I don't worry about my brain," McDaniel insists. "That helmet shows I went out there and did my job. That's all. When I posted the picture, a bunch of people from back home [in Madison, Florida] said, 'Hey, that's exactly what your helmet used to look like in high school.'"

Near the end of the first half, the Jags take the lead 7-6 with a 31-yard TD pass from Blake Bortles to Allen Robinson. Because the Browns rush only three defenders, McDaniel, after initially locking up with Beadles, gets double-teamed (again) from the left by Bowanko. McDaniel literally disappears from view, pinballing back and forth behind a thick, doughy wall of blockers. "The marks on the side and the tears in the tape, those tell you you got double-teamed and hit from different sides at the same time," McDaniel said.

Maybe the most telling thing about McDaniel's helmet hieroglyphics is that his best play of the day left no record at all. With 3:10 left in the third quarter and the Jags driving again, McDaniel is matched up one-on-one with Joeckel, the second overall pick in the 2013 draft. At the snap, McDaniel gets excellent penetration, hand placement and explosion, pushing Joeckel straight back 4 yards deep into the pocket. He's in such control that he's able to release his right hand and bat down Bortles' pass. The linemen's helmets never touch.

Bortles must have seen a chance for a big gain because he angrily claps his hands after his pass is batted down by the rookie. "This was a lifelong dream of mine," McDaniel said. "People say it's hard in there, say it's so fast. I didn't really get that feeling. Once I got comfortable, I was coming off the ball better and my hand placement was better and I started making plays. I just didn't make enough of them."

McDaniel got his first TV close-up after his pass deflection, and the camera shows that a majority of his helmet marks came late in the game as the Jags tried to grind out the clock on the ground. "Yeah, the big smudges come from serious, extended contact on run plays where you're engaged with someone down the line, rubbing helmets in a crowd or a pile for a long time," McDaniel said.

As the game wound down, I thought I had charted, as best I could, the origin of almost every scratch, smudge and divot in McDaniel's helmet -- except the one I really wanted to explain. The cat scratch.

Then, just after the two-minute warning, with Jacksonville in control 24-6 and about to win its first game of the season, and just when you'd expect things to be chilling out a bit, the Jags line up to run a good old-fashioned power-I dive. Still defending the A gap, McDaniel explodes into backup center Jacques McClendon like a PO'ed mountain ram. All the force created by the two players' combined 611 pounds seems to be absorbed into their locked facemasks. A Jags tackle joins the fray, pushing the total torque near 1,000 pounds. And as the corner of the Jags lineman's facemask claws down the side of McDaniel's helmet, you can almost hear the grinding, twisting and scratching of metal, plastic and bone at the line of scrimmage, like a 10-car pileup replayed in Dolby surround sound and in super slo-mo.

At the start of the play I was still wondering what on earth could have ever possibly left those three deep gouges in McDaniel's helmet. By the end of it, I was left wondering how there was anything left of his helmet at all.

Still, in talking to McDaniel, the worst of the wreckage seems to be emotional. His reward for enduring all this with one day to prepare and one day to celebrate? On Monday, the Browns cut him. Brutal. Forget the helmet. Think about this kid's heart. "I'm not proud of one mark or another; I'm proud of the whole helmet," McDaniel said. "Because no matter what happens now, it shows people what I did. I look at it and I know I belong out there. And that's a feeling I can't really describe."

McDaniel doesn't need to. The condition of his helmet tells you all you need to know.

The game left its mark on him.

All he wants now is a chance to return the favor.