YOUR NAME is Craig Patterson and you've made the cut in the National Football League and sometimes you can't believe it. No one else can either. Talk about long odds. You were a free agent and an overage one at that. You didn't even start in college. But you're starting now - at defensive end for the Phoenix Cardinals.
Sometimes you're afraid you'll wake up and find it's all a dream.Then again, you're convinced you belong here, that you've earned this. You've always believed you had what it takes to make the grade, even if you were the only one. Your football coaches thought otherwise and placed you on the second string. One day, when you couldn't take it anymore, you angrily confronted your position coach, but all that did was win you a one-game suspension. You spent most of your college career standing on the sidelines.
When the National Football League scouts came to Provo to evaluate top seniors for the upcoming draft, you asked them to time you in 40-yard sprints. They looked puzzled. Your name wasn't on their list. "What?" they said. "You want me to time you and you didn't start? Why didn't you start?" Another scout flat turned you down. "I can't spend my time looking at every Tom, Dick and Harry," he said.
The scouts who did let you run were amazed. You were 6-foot-4, 300-and-something pounds and ran 4.8s and 4.9s. Still, they had little game film with which to study your performance on the field, and only a few teams invited you to try out as a free agent.
You enjoy looking back on all this now. Here it is, only two years later, and you showed them all. You're wearing a uniform in the NFL. Who would've thought? All your friends in back home in Castle Dale, Utah, are calling your parents. They can't believe it. This is the biggest thing to hit town since Shawn Bradley's mission call.
"I don't feel like a starter in the NFL," you say. "I'm the same old person I was at BYU. I'm kind of in awe. We played the Eagles a couple of weeks ago, and I was lining up against Jim McMahon. I'd seen all those guys on TV."
Looking back now, you must wonder at times how much easier things could have have been. Your college career just never worked out. Following your freshman year at BYU, you went on an LDS Church mission to Hawaii weighing 230 pounds; you returned two years later weighing 290. You blamed it on the Polynesian food, but your weight continued to climb to well over 300, and that's where it has stayed all these years (hence, your current nickname: Bad Body). The weight was only one of your problems. You started as a sophomore, but in the second game of your junior year you broke your leg so severely that it required a metal plate and screws to repair. This happened one week after you broke your hand, which also required a metal plate and screws to repair. You sat out the rest of the season to mend, and, for once in your life, you considered quitting. You wondered if football was worth the pain.
Jason Buck, a former BYU teammate with the Cincinnati Bengals, returned to Provo straight from the Super Bowl and told you, "You've got what it takes to play in the NFL. You can make it." Your enthusiasm renewed, you returned for your senior season, but you found yourself on the sidelines every Saturday. Finally, you couldn't stand it anymore. You walked into your coach's office and told him you thought you deserved to play, that the films showed you should start. To say the least, the coach had another opinion. It turned into a bad scene. Before you knew it, you were both screaming at each other and everyone in the football office was running for cover. Afterward, you went home and skipped practice. You returned the next day as the team was boarding a bus for a road game, but the coaches told you not to bother. You were reinstated the following week and returned to your spot on the sidelines.
All that notwithstanding, NFL scouts were impressed enough with your combination of speed, size and maneuverability that a handful of teams invited you for a tryout. Cincinnati cut you on the next-to-last cut. "I just wasn't ready," you say now. "I hadn't started for two years at BYU. I was rusty."
That might have been the end of your career if the NFL hadn't approved five-man practice squads a few weeks later. The Cardinals put you on their practice squad. They activated you for two games, but you played a total of only three plays. Somehow, you won the starting job in training camp this fall.
You say you have no bad feelings toward BYU coaches. They just had a different opinion. Who can see the future? Isn't it ironic that your two highly publicized former BYU teammates, Buck and Shawn Knight, both All-American defensive ends and first-round draft picks, are out of the league at the moment? But here you are, a starter in the NFL.