As a 5-foot-11, 200-pound 34-year-old, long snapper Nate Boyer's odds of making an NFL roster are slim. However, Boyer has faced far more daunting challenges. As Yahoo Sports reported, the former Green Beret and Texas Longhorns starter's unlikely story is filled with perseverance and success.
People join the military for any number of reasons. To see those brotherhoods, to aid those brotherhoods, is why Boyer did.
A decade prior Boyer was drifting through early adulthood. He grew up the son of a veterinarian father and a Ph.D., and environmental engineer mother in the affluent suburbs of San Francisco. He eschewed college, however, because he didn't have direction. He was smart and tested well, but his grades were poor. He barely tried. He found himself repeatedly in trouble. He wasn't good at following the path, any path.
So he worked as a deck hand on a sport fishing boat in San Diego for a while. He trained to be a firefighter before changing his mind. He went to Hollywood and took a shot at acting. He appeared in just one television commercial, for Greyhound.
One day in 2004, moved by a Time magazine account on the horrific genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan, he decided to go help. He couldn't find a relief organization that would take him though. He had no credentials and those groups have seen too many well meaning people show up amid the suffering, the depravity and the hardship and just quit, begging to fly home.
Undeterred, Boyer decided to go uninvited, assuming someone wouldn't turn him away if he was actually, physically there. He flew to N'Djamena, Chad, which borders the Sudan, and somehow talked his way onto a United Nation's flight that eventually led him to the sprawling Tulum refugee camp.
After working with the Catholic Relief Services Boyer felt called to do more. He thought helping to win the war that caused all the misery and suffering was what he happened to be best suited for. So, he decided to join the Green Berets.
A week after returning to the States, he enlisted in the Army with the purpose of joining the elite Special Forces.
"It's unconventional warfare," he said of the Special Forces' unique purpose. "We go link up with the indigenous people, we work with them, we train them, we do everything with them and then we go fight with them. That was more appealing to me than just joining the Army.
"I read a lot about it. I wanted to be really hands-on and I wanted to be with those people and understand what was going on, not just politically. What can I do to actually help them?
"Every deployment I ever went on there are struggles and frustrations and you think, 'What am I doing out here, what are we trying to accomplish?' But at the end of the day when you look back on the people you work with, the relationships you build, they become your brothers in arms too, even though they are from another country.
"Big picture-wise, politically, I don't know anything about that," he continued. "I am not a political person. I can't stand politicians for the most part. But I know what we do when we are there as far as the Special Forces go. There is nothing like that, fighting for each other ...
"It's as human as it gets."
As he turned 27 Boyer decided the time to attend college was at hand. However, he wasn't satisfied with the challenge of academia because while he was earning straight As he decided to walk on at one of America's premier D1 football programs.
He'd played high school basketball and baseball but never football. He loved the game however and decided if he was going to college, he was going to walk on with a team.
He stands 5-foot-11, weighs 200 pounds and by his own estimation is not a great athlete. He is a Green Beret though, which meant he was athletic enough and unquestionably tough. It wasn't just the combat missions, but completing the Special Forces training schools and its qualification course, where 150 dedicated men entered but only 11 finished.
"It's just about going as hard as you can at all times regardless of the pain you are in, mental and physical," Boyer said. "And you're in a lot of it. You're tired and you're hungry. It sucks. But you just get so much out of it. Getting through a mock POW camp after you just did survival training and you don't eat anything and you're just depleted of all hope and rest and nourishment, you're just beat. You make it through that you know you can't be broken.
"I know now there is nothing I can't handle. I may not survive it, but I won't quit."
So he figured he could handle college football. Under the searing Iraqi sun he began running through training drills he studied from YouTube. And he decided if he was going to play college football, why not walk onto the best team?
He made the roster for the Texas Longhorns and eventually worked his way into the starting long snapper position and a full scholarship. He performed his role spectacularly.
"In three years, he never had a bad snap," Brown marveled. "Not one."
His chief advantage? No nerves. You've been through daily firefights in Iraq and there is no such thing as a pressured snap against, say, Iowa State.
"The stage doesn't bother me," he said.
But even that wasn't enough for Boyer. In the off season he continued to serve his country. In the months that most college kids spend relaxing Boyer was on combat patrols with a National Guard special forces unit in Afghanistan.
It's great to be a scholarship football player at Texas. There's a lot of work between training and classes, but for the most part, you're living a dream. It's even better in the summer, when demands lighten. "It is the good life," Boyer agreed.
If there was ever a time for a guy to not volunteer to go fight the Taliban in some far off mountain range, this would seem to be it. Especially when he'd already served his country – winning a Bronze Star in Iraq – so admirably. Boyer saw it differently.
"I thought of it this way: If I, someone who wants to be there, doesn't volunteer, there may be someone there who doesn't want to be there," Boyer said. "Maybe he's got a wife and kids and God forbid something happens. If something would've happened to my body, I knew I could handle it.
Now that he's graduated college, with a bachelor's and master's degree, and his military career is at an end, Boyer is taking a shot at the National Football League. He's currently looking for any opportunity to prove himself to a pro team. To prove that he can overcome yet another challenge.
Making the NFL, he says, shouldn't be about what he's done. It's about using what he's done to beat the odds.
"I am going to work as hard as anyone you've got at any position, even if I'm just a long snapper," he promised.
Here in these days of transition, a rare moment for pause after a decade of action, the whole thing is humbling. A long-haired kid seeking direction takes a scattershot trip to Darfur, which leads to the Special Forces, which leads to the deserts of Iraq, which leads to football fields of Texas, which leads to the mountains of Afghanistan, which leads to playing in front of NFL scouts, which leads to this, to now, to who knows?