Orchard Park, N.Y. -- On the practice field at Stanford's recruiting camp in 2013, a 17-year-old Harrison Phillips saw a path to a college football scholarship.

At the end of a grueling two days of practices 1,700 miles west of his hometown of Omaha, Neb., Phillips joined the rest of the linemen for a drill known as "King of the Boards." The drill dates to the 1940s and is as simple as it is intense. In Stanford's version, two players line up a few yards away from one another with a board between them. On the whistle, the two hit each other. Whoever drives the other backward past the end of the board is the winner.

This drill was the final test for Phillips and other recruits. The losers go off to the side, the winners continue. The last man standing among the 150 recruits would be "King of the Boards."

For some, this may have been just one drill in just another camp. For Phillips, it was everything. He had been relentlessly sending Stanford coaches his game tape. They were impressed, but not convinced, by the footage of Phillips, a 240-pound defensive lineman ragdolling 215-pound offensive linemen in Nebraska. They would need to see him at their camp to give him an offer.

That sounds simple enough, but for Phillips and his family, it wasn't. At the time, Phillips' father, Paul, had lost his job after 26 years. To that point, Paul and Harrison had been going to camps only within driving distance of Omaha. Iowa, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Northwestern and Nebraska. He had been going to Nebraska since he was in eighth grade and had been to the Cornhuskers' camp just prior to his trip to Stanford and visited with then coach Bo Pelini.

"We really like you, but we just don't know where we're going to put you," Pelini told him.

On the way home, Phillips told his parents he thought he needed to go to another camp. But money was tight.

"Where do you want to go?" Harrison's mother, Tammie, asked him.

"I'd like to go to Stanford," he said.

Between the academics, the California locale and playing in the Pac-12, Stanford seemed like an ideal fit. But the camp cost $300, and that was before flights and a hotel stay in the San Francisco area. All things considered, the camp was a $3,000 gamble for a family without much wiggle room. That's when Harrison's grandmother, a diehard Kansas State fan, jumped in.

"If he wants to go to Stanford, you are not passing that school up," Tammie recalls her mother saying. "I will pay for you to go, and I will go with you."

Harrison's grandmother had never been to California and wanted to experience her grandson's recruiting process. So off they went. Harrison, his mother and his grandmother traveled to California confident the Stanford coaches would like what they were about to see. After missing connecting flights in Denver and enduring a night of short rest, Phillips fought through two days of practice to arrive at the King of the Boards. A three-time state wrestling champion at Millard West, Phillips was made for this moment.

One by one, Phillips mauled his way through the competition. A 300-pound offensive lineman?

Crack!

There Phillips was, a player Pelini couldn't find a position for, going toe-to-toe with some of the top recruits Stanford could find.

Thud!

Phillips found himself in the finals, one rep away from being King of the Boards. His opponent had 30 pounds on him, but that was nothing compared to the 80-plus pounds he sacrificed to his freshman year wrestling partner in high school. Phillips had spent too many hours in the weight room and his family had spent too much money for him to come up short.

With all eyes on him, the whistle blew. One final thud and some hooting and hollering from onlookers. Phillips was the King of the Boards.

Days later, Phillips was on the phone with Stanford coach David Shaw, who had left the camp early to vacation with his family in Africa. Stanford's assistants sent Phillips' tape to Shaw and as soon as Shaw had cell-phone service, he called Phillips to offer him a scholarship. Phillips cried. His parents cried. His grandmother cried.

Phillips' grandmother would pass away in 2015 before getting a chance to see him play in person, but she made everything possible.

"I chose to put all my eggs in the Stanford basket and earn my scholarship," Phillips said.

"You did that," Shaw told him.

Once word got out that Stanford had offered him, Pelini called Phillips with an offer. In Nebraska, kids bleed Cornhusker red. Some will walk on for a chance to play for the home state.

"Harrison said, 'I'm going to bleed red, but it's going to be another color red,'" Tammie recalled. "It's going to be Cardinal red."

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Phillips was the kid in Omaha who always looked older than he was. His parents didn't let him play football right away because coaches told them that, by rule, Harrison was too big. Instead, he played soccer. His mother recalls bringing his birth certificate to every game because someone always questioned his age. All the while, Phillips was begging to play football.

When Phillips was in third grade, he asked his mom to print out some letters for him.

"He said, 'I need an L, I need an F and I need an N,'' Tammie remembers Harrison saying. "I didn't put it together, so I printed out these big letters, each one on a different piece of paper."

Harrison took those letters and put them on the ceiling above his bed so he could be reminded of his goal every night.

"N.F.L."

At that point, Tammie thought, "Oh my gosh, I have to let him play football."

Once Harrison was in sixth grade, his parents let him play football for the first time. His mom still remembers the way he reacted at that first practice.

"The minute he put that helmet on, he was in love," Tammie said. "They gave him that helmet for the first time and he was jumping and shouting and screaming. It was just the funniest thing. He acted like a first-grader."

From the start, Harrison wanted to get to practice early and stay late. He would come home and want to practice with his sister Delanie, who was two years older and an impressive athlete in her own right. And as large as Harrison always was, his dreams were that much bigger.

Scott Townsley, Phillips' wrestling coach at Millard West, remembers Phillips, then a sophomore, telling him he was going to play in the NFL.

"Dude, you're not even starting on our varsity yet," Townsley told him.

"No, I'm playing in the NFL," Phillips said.

Phillips worked tirelessly to make it a reality long before the Buffalo Bills drafted him in the third round last month. He played football in the fall, wrestled in the winter and threw shot-put and discus for the track team. Before school and during lunch, he would lift weights. He would hit the gym after practice, too.

"I lifted until I had to call my parents to pick me up from the gym because I couldn't even drive my legs were so sore," Phillips said.

That's how he became a three-time state champion as a wrestler and a terror on the defensive line. By his senior year of wrestling, Phillips had a hard time finding wrestling opponents. Most schools would forfeit for his weight class because they didn't have anybody who could match up with him.

"He was so dominant that he would literally be wrestling someone and the opposing coach would yell, 'Would you please just pin our kid?'" Townsley said. "It was that bad."

Phillips had his sights set on state takedown records as a heavyweight but didn't get enough matches to reach the goal because of the forfeits. It became a necessity for Millard West to go to national tournaments. His parents traveled to just about everything, but they decided to skip the wrestling tournament in Virginia Beach. Tammie said money was tight, but she also wasn't sure how Harrison would do against that type of competition.

"It was at the time, and may still be, one of the toughest tournaments in the nation high school-wise," Townsley said. "No one there knew his name, and he just train-wrecked everybody. It wasn't even close."

Phillips had wrestled since he was 3 years old. As he put it, it was his first chance to "kick somebody's ass." But his love was football. You can see it in his high school tape on Hudl. It's still there. Look it up, Phillips insists. He's the one ripping through the offensive line and mercilessly whipping ball carriers to the ground. Millard West football coach Kirk Peterson still remembers Phillips' final game.

"He goes in to block a punt and basically does a full flip in the air over the protector and blocked it," Peterson said. "He was just going to refuse to come off the field until we won. We ended up coming up short in that particular game, but that's just the type of kid he was.

"I bet he spent more time training with different trainers and speed people after practices than he did actual practice time when he was in high school ... He was just never going to go home. If there was more work to be done, he was going to find something to do. That's how driven he was."

Watch Phillips' Stanford tape and that attitude is still there. Even after a torn ACL in 2015, Phillips kept getting stronger. From the unglamorous nose tackle position, Phillips found a way to shine.

"I kind of say the saying that my position is like the fire hydrant at the dog show," Phillips said at the Senior Bowl. "You're the guy in the middle right there and everyone's kind of coming up and pissing on you. I was able to be a really shiny fire hydrant at the dog show, I guess."

That's an eloquent way of explaining Phillips' team-leading 103 tackles as a senior at Stanford.

"That's what I enjoyed watching him do at Stanford the most," Peterson said. "That ball is snapped and he's so quick to get his hands on the inside and get separated from him and just bottle things up in the middle. Just the strength in that aspect was so fun to watch."

That type of hand speed was forged after years in the wrestling room. His mom's family comes from a farming background and his father routinely worked 12-hour days, so Phillips was no stranger to work.

"He was a freak of an athlete," Townsley said. "But he could turn on the work ethic, too."

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The barrel-chested defensive tackle emerges from the weight room at the ADPRO Sports Training Center, tape around both wrists and breathing heavy after his first NFL practice. Harrison Phillips is home.

He's now nearly 1,000 miles east of Omaha and over 2,500 miles east of Stanford, but something about Buffalo feels like home. He greets you with an easy smile and a vice grip that helped him put up 42 reps at 225 pounds on the bench press at the NFL Combine.

"It feels right," Phillips says. "I walked outside and the air, it felt right, it smelled right. The locker, I looked at the locker and it's like this is where I'm supposed to be."

Connecting the dots between Phillips and the Bills is easy enough. Like Bills coach Sean McDermott, Phillips is an ex-wrestler. As far back as the Senior Bowl, Phillips was asked questions about the comparisons between him and longtime Bills defensive lineman Kyle Williams. Phillips spoke glowingly of the process before he ever saw the word plastered all over the walls of the Bills' facility.

While the snapshots of Phillips' life don't tell the whole story, the short video his sister posted from the night he was drafted offers a glimpse at the person the Bills are getting. There weren't dozens of people at a draft party. Instead, Phillips insisted on just his parents, his sister and one close friend joining him on Friday night. When the phone rang and it was a 716 area code, the tears started flowing.

"It was just a rush of everything," Phillips said. "Anxiety, nervousness, excitement, love. I felt it all. The video was probably 10 minutes after I got the call. I was crying for a good 10 minutes before I could even catch my wits. I just there there and it was bliss."

As McDermott said, "Getting to know Harrison was not hard. He's the type of guy we look for."

Phillips and McDermott exchanged wrestling moves when they first met. Phillips sent Bills general manager Brandon Beane a text after they met at the combine to thank him. When he went home to Nebraska, Phillips told his parents about his meetings with the Bills. Everything just clicked.

Now he's back to doing what he loves. He's lifting weights, studying a playbook and strapping on a helmet. On top of that, he'll now earn a steady paycheck to play a game he once begged to play for free. He'll do it with two degrees from Stanford under his belt, too. His parents won't ask for much, either.

"That is his hard-earned money," Tammie said. "We are so proud that he will never have to struggle."

All they want are those two game tickets Phillips gets each week. Paul and Tammie already have their trip booked for the Bills' first preseason game on Aug. 9. Tammie is coming equipped with Kleenex and a list of the best wings spots fans have already been sending them. She broke down in tears recently after her daughter sent her a video a mom posted on social media. In it, a young boy had just opened a package with a Buffalo Bills jersey inside. On the back was "Phillips" and the number 99.

"I really just couldn't stop crying of happiness," Tammie said. "This boy got a jersey that was probably $100 and it's our son on it. It really hit me."

It's starting to hit Phillips, too. The family never had a favorite NFL team living in Nebraska. It was all college football. Phillips is still figuring out which teams are in which conference. As he stood inside the Bills' practice facility on a recent spring afternoon, his fellow rookies all around him, a breeze blowing through the doors, The King of the Boards breathed it all in.

"I think the whole time the Bills must have been my favorite team, because it feels amazing to be here," Phillips said.