There are fifteen junior colleges in Mississippi, and fourteen of them play football. Together they form a last-chance confederation, a string of schools in mostly crossroad towns stretching from the piney woods in the east to steamy burgs near the Gulf to the exurbs of Memphis and the vast, dark Delta. It’s Thursday Night Lights, untelevised and off the grid. One coach dubbed it, without irony, "the island of misfit toys."

Over the years, more than 200 kids from the Mississippi league have gone on to NFL teams: at least fifty from Hinds, in tiny Raymond; forty from Northwest Mississippi, in Senatobia; twenty-five from Mississippi Gulf Coast, in Perkinston. The 1992 Itawamba squad alone sent at least six players to the NFL.

And yet each school’s fifty-five-man roster does tend to over-represent the discarded and dispossessed: lawbreakers, rule-benders, dropouts, dipshits, potheads, and assorted other screwups—almost all of whom can flat-out ball. Coaches recruit kids from houses without food, without parents, without floors. One coach sat across from a mother who stared back at him with four eyes. "She had a pair of eyeballs tattooed right over her titties," he told me. "It gets surreal sometimes." Another recruit failed a drug test after smoking dope with his dad on the drive to school.

"It’s a second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-chance league," says Allen Sentimore, an East Mississippi defensive back who showed up two years ago from Laurel, Mississippi, with a GED, a gold grill, and no idea what he was doing.

He wasn’t playing well enough to be recruited to the big time, so when his mother lost her job and was evicted from her apartment in the middle of his freshman season, Sentimore split to work two jobs back home, one on a pipeline, the other at a technology plant. Both sucked.

He returned to Scooba with a new resolve and, last year, led all junior-college players in interceptions. Georgia called. Alabama called.

"I was like, Whoa, they want me?" he says. "That’s when I started putting my heart in it. I feel like I’m not ballin’ for me. I’m ballin’ for what’s on my back."

The only obstacle now: "If I can get out of that math class, I’ll be good."

While every team has a few straight-A students, most juco players are academically at risk. At East Mississippi, the average ACT score is 17, less than half the possible high of 36. One kid had a 10.

Other players are "drop-downs," kicked out of major programs for screwing up royally.

"I had the world by the balls. By the balls," says Chad Kelly, East Mississippi’s new quarterback and perhaps this season’s most celebrated drop-down.

A former high school All-American from Buffalo and nephew of Bills Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly, the six-foot-three, 220-pound redshirt sophomore was thrown out of Clemson after this April’s spring game. He got in head coach Dabo Swinney’s face for sending in the punt team on a fourth-and-short near midfield.

"Why the fuck didn’t we go for it?" Kelly shouted as the first half wound down.

Before that day, Kelly was battling for the starting job at a southern football power while living in a two-story apartment with his girlfriend, an Atlanta Falcons cheerleader. Less than a week later, he was in Scooba, where he sleeps on a twin bed in a dorm room he shares with a wide receiver.

"It is what it is. I gotta deal with it," says Kelly, who plans to be out of Scooba by December and back playing with a big-time school. "I’ve humbled myself since I’ve been here. I don’t take anything for granted."