Cincinnati Bengals nose tackle Craig Patterson feels a little self-conscious when he tells other players he's a 25-year-old rookie.
"I've had guys who are 26 years old say, `I've been in the league for five years,' " said Patterson, a free agent from Brigham Young University.Patterson spent two years as a missionary in Hawaii for the LDS church.
Now, he's trying to recapture what he gave up for the church. If he is lucky, he will get to play on the Bengals' defensive line with his friend, and former BYU teammate, Jason Buck, a first-round draft pick by the Bengals in 1987.
A resident of Castledale, Utah, Patterson said he has no regrets about his missionary work.
"When I left for the mission, I knew it would be like this," Patterson said. "But I felt like that was more important than football at the time."
The places Patterson went door-to-door teaching people about the Mormon church weren't as picturesque as the Hawaii of travel brochures.
"We went into slums where most haoles, that's what the people there call white people, wouldn't go," Patterson said. "They were real bad areas. But the people were nice to us. They'd invite us in and we'd sit down and eat."
And eat. And eat some more.
"I really wanted to immerse myself in the culture, so I ate their food. I really liked it," Patterson said.
With all the eating and no weight training, he ballooned from 230 to 290 pounds in two years.
"It was ugly weight. I wasn't as strong as I was when I left," Patterson said. "They gave us one day off a week to do chores for ourselves, so I lifted about once a month."
By the time he returned to BYU, Patterson was so overweight and out of shape that he redshirted a year.
In his sophomore season, he started at nose tackle. The next year, he started two games but suffered a broken leg that knocked him out for the rest of the season. His weight went up to 350 pounds.
He managed bring his weight down to 305 in time for his senior season, but didn't get his starting job back. Last year, he was backup at nose tackle and defensive tackle. No pro scouts came knocking at his door.
"A lot of the attitude from the pro scouts was, `If you can't start for BYU, there must be something wrong with you,' " Patterson said. "So, when (Bengals linebacker coach) Dick Selcer came out here, I asked if I could work out for him with the linebackers.
"I weighed 305 and I ran a 4.88 (in the 40-yard dash)."
Patterson turned in a 5.08 in the 40-yard dash on the AstroTurf at Spinney Field during mini-camp.
"What was more impressive than that was his time at the 10-yard mark," said Bengals defensive line coach Chuck Studley. "Among the defensive linemen, he had the second-fastest time (1.67). Jason Buck had the fastest of 1.60.
"We're talking about a guy who is about 30 pounds heavier covering a lot of ground in a short period of time."
Studley said he would like Patterson to report to training camp at 295 pounds.
"I'm not going to take him down that far," Studley said. "He's not a really fat guy. He's got a little gut, but he's got good legs and good explosiveness. I really don't understand why he wasn't drafted."
With Tim Krumrie at nose tackle, backed up by Mike Hammerstein, Patterson knows the odds of him making the team are slim, but he said it is his No. 1 goal at the moment.
"I got my degree in psychology, but I don't plan on pursuing that as a career," he said. "I'll probably just get a job in the business world if this doesn't work out.
"But I have to think that my chances are just as good as any other rookie. I look at my two years off as two years that I wasn't getting my body all beat up. I plan on trying to play football until I'm done."