Every spring, a bunch of grown men sit behind desks and assign other grown men a number that follows them for the rest of their professional lives — QB7, a first-round tackle, “fell all the way to the third round, absolute steal.” I’ve watched enough of these broadcasts with my brother, who mostly communicates in Airdropped Chargers highlights with zero context, to know how fast that number calcifies into identity. Nobody says “the Cowboys’ new outside linebacker.” They say “third-rounder,” forever, the way a batting average gets stapled to a nickname.
That number is supposed to sit there until next year’s mock drafts bury it. It isn’t supposed to get a second life on a different network, in a different sport, next to a girlfriend who outranked it by five full rounds a year later.
Sonia Citron was drafted third overall by the Mystics in the 2025 WNBA Draft, out of Notre Dame. Her boyfriend, Cowboys linebacker Marist Liufau, went in the third round to the Cowboys the year before, 87th overall. The gap between those two numbers has turned into a WNBA-NFL power couple’s chronically online running bit, and it keeps working as a joke because it’s aimed at something we don’t actually have a script for: a cross-sport couple where the woman’s professional stock is, by any measure that counts, the higher one. Instead of sitting with that, the internet reaches for a punchline. What that reveals isn’t about Citron or Liufau. It’s about how unfamiliar this particular shape of couple still is to everyone watching.
The bit has an origin story, and it’s old enough now that it counts as lore rather than news. At the 2025 WNBA Draft, ESPN’s Holly Rowe told Citron on stage, camera cutting to Liufau in the crowd: “Your boyfriend, Marist, is here… For the record, you got drafted higher than he did in the NFL, so, shoutout to the girls.” Liufau laughed and cheered. The clip went everywhere because it flipped a familiar broadcast habit — usually the man’s career is the real story and the girlfriend is color commentary, not the other way around.
They’d known each other a long time before any of this. Citron and Liufau met and started dating as student-athletes at Notre Dame, their careers overlapping from around 2021 into 2023, before either name meant anything outside campus. The internet retrofitting their relationship into a draft-slot rivalry starts to look absurd once you remember that part.
Since then, the running bit has mostly played out as public affection with a wink attached. Citron has worn Liufau’s Cowboys gear more than once: a cropped No. 35 jersey with a denim skirt at Mystics practice, then the jersey again with a cowboy hat for a pregame appearance at AT&T Stadium, enough that the Cowboys’ own account posted a photo of the two captioned “Power Couple ⭐️.” Liufau reciprocates. When Citron beat Marina Mabrey in the first round of Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament this February, he watched on the StudBudz livestream wearing her Hive BC jersey and introduced himself to the chat: “My name is Marist, Sonia’s boyfriend. We got the dub today!”
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUrDRgLD7FO/
He shows up in her gear in the smaller moments too, the kind that don’t come with a team press release attached.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DKqA3aASGvo/
It would be easy to fold Sonia Citron and Marist Liufau into the Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift dynamic I wrote about a few months back — famous athlete, famous partner, discourse ensues. That comparison falls apart fast. Swift’s fame operates entirely outside football; Kelce gets pulled into her orbit, not measured against her on a shared scale. Citron and Liufau are on the same scale, the same draft-industrial complex, just two different leagues grading it. That’s a narrower, stranger gap to make sense of, which is why “shoutout to the girls” got repeated as a bit instead of shrugged off as a nice moment on a Tuesday.
Part of why the joke keeps having material to work with is that Citron’s basketball is good on its own terms, not just relative to her boyfriend’s draft slot. She made her second consecutive All-Star team this year, and Liufau posted an appreciation message on Instagram: “Appreciation post for this amazing woman. You inspire me to be better every day in sports and in life. I love supporting you.” She replied publicly: “Couldn’t do it without you.”
Earlier in June, a late-game shot of hers made the rounds on basketball Twitter for reasons that had nothing to do with her NFL boyfriend.
https://twitter.com/libaanstar1/status/2065612795505164326
Then, on June 28, the Mystics beat the Portland Fire 124-123 in four overtimes, tying the record for the longest game in WNBA history, only the second four-overtime game ever and the first since 2001. Citron put up a career-high 32 points on 45 percent shooting, with six rebounds and four assists, and hit the go-ahead bucket with 21.4 seconds left. Liufau called her the greatest afterward. A 32-point night in a four-overtime classic doesn’t need a boyfriend’s testimonial to count as the main event.
The people who keep the drafted-higher joke in circulation are mostly the same people who couldn’t name five other players on the Mystics roster, which is its own small piece of evidence for a WNBA landscape most casual fans still aren’t watching closely, even as it produces four-overtime classics on a random Saturday in June.
Marist Liufau’s WNBA girlfriend has the better highlight reel lately, and neither fanbase is over it. Call it its own genre now: the WNBA-NFL couple draft joke that refuses to retire.
Maybe that’s overreading a couple who mostly just seem to like each other in public, and the joke is exactly as light as it looks: two people from the same college, one of whom happens to have a funnier draft story than the other. That reading is fair. People do not need a sociology paper attached to every Instagram caption.
But the joke has outlasted plenty of one-off draft-night bits that should’ve had a shorter shelf life, and the reason might be that it’s still doing work nobody’s found a better way to do. Liufau is moving to outside linebacker for the Cowboys this season, a new position, another number to be assigned. Citron’s number only goes up. At some point the internet will either build a normal way to talk about that gap or it won’t, and either way, Sonia Citron and Marist Liufau will keep showing up in each other’s gear regardless of what the discourse decides to do with it. For more on her side of that gap, there’s the rest of our WNBA coverage.
