ESPNNY: "Jets' 'Big Snacks' making big impact"

It's a really long article, so I'll just post an excerpt. Highly recommend reading this non douchey Cimini piece about SNACKS.

http://espn.go.com/new-york/columns...damon-harrison-water-boy-starting-nose-tackle

Five years ago, Damon Harrison quit his job as an overnight stock boy at Wal-Mart and left his home in Lake Charles, La., for a college he knew nothing about.

Harrison didn't know William Penn University existed until a couple of days before his recruiting trip, when he searched the school on a computer. He thought he was visiting William & Mary. When the recruiter mentioned "William" in their conversation, he immediately assumed it was the school in Virginia.

No matter. Harrison wanted to play football, not stock shelves for $14 an hour, so he was all-in.

One of his former coaches at Northwest Mississippi Community College, Steve Miller, was the new defensive line coach at William Penn, and he needed players. Harrison met Miller and six other potential recruits at NMCC in Senatobia, Miss., and they crammed into a Jeep Cherokee for an eight-hour drive to Oskaloosa, Iowa, home of the William Penn Statesmen -- an NAIA school.

On the drive north, Harrison saw snow for the first time.

He laughed at the memory as he stood last week in the plush New York Jets locker room. He starts at nose tackle for the Jets, only one year after arriving as an undrafted free agent. "Big Snacks," the nickname he received as a rookie, is now a Big Deal.

"The whole journey in itself, it's a whole lot more than people know," said Harrison, who once served as the water boy on his middle school team because he wasn't good enough to play. "It's amazing, man. It's a blessing."

***

The Jets' area scouts spend the entire fall on the road, driving from school to school in search of talent. The typical scout is on the road for 150 days a year and will visit 42 to 44 schools, knowing ahead of time that at least 20 of those schools will produce no one good enough to hear their name called at Radio City Music Hall in April.

For every Michigan, there's a William Penn.

But they make the trips anyway, because you never know.

"We're all hoping," Jeff Bauer said. "As an area scout, you know that on 50 percent of your stops, you won't see anyone that will be drafted. But you keep grinding, looking for that one guy."

Bauer is the Jets' director of college scouting, but he spent 11 years as their Midwest scout, covering Minnesota to Texas and Kansas to Indiana. At heart, he's an Iowa man. He lives in Ankeny, where he was born and raised, and he played football at Iowa State. He knows the state better than MapQuest.

Before the 2011 season, Bauer was assigned to write a report on a 6-foot-2, 347-pound defensive tackle named Damon Harrison, whose name appeared on the NFL scouting combine's list of prospects. At the time, Harrison was just one of 400 names on the list.

But you never know.

Bauer got in his car in September 2011 and drove to Oskaloosa, a city of 11,500 in the middle of the state. It was only the second time he had visited William Penn.