Jeff Saturday: From pumping gas to the Colts Ring of Honor

After every last one of the scouts at his North Carolina pro day told him he was too small and too slow, that his arms were too short, that he'd never sniff a single down in the NFL, he hopped in his car and headed to his afternoon shift at the Eastgate BP. That's where the All-ACC center worked in the summers, where he pumped gas, cleaned bathrooms and plugged tires.

His boss saw him slog in, head down, shoulders slumped. "How'd it go?" James Spurling asked.

"I guess I'll be pumping freakin' gas the rest of my life," Jeff Saturday said, choking back the tears.

Seventeen years later, on the eve of his induction into the Indianapolis Colts Ring of Honor, he laughs about that day. He couldn't then. It was the spring of 1998, and Saturday sat slumped on a bench outside the gas station, sulking for hours, dejected and despondent. He assumed he'd bombed his best chance at the pros. At that point, his NFL prospects were thin, his odds impossibly long.

What did he do next? He ignored them. He defied them.

The kid they said was too small and too slow, that had arms that were too short, that would never sniff a single down in the NFL?

The kid who thought he'd be pumping freakin' gas the rest of his life?

He played 14 years in the NFL. Made five Pro Bowls. Won a world championship.

"All those scouts told him he'd never make it," Spurling says now. "Well, Jeff went out and wrote his own book."

"They basically measured me up, ran me through drills, then told me all the reasons I couldn't play in the NFL," Saturday recalls. "I wasn't a combine guy. I was never going to test well."

No. He wasn't. Saturday didn't have the so-called measurables: He was 6-2, too short for your average NFL lineman, and 292 pounds, too small for your average NFL lineman. The scouts and NFL executives watched him work out that morning at UNC, then yawned. At the gas station, hours later, Spurling tried to console him. Saturday wouldn't hear it.

"There's just no way," Saturday told him. "Everything they said was negative. It's a done deal."

It damn near was. A few months later, after Saturday had fizzled out during a brief training camp stay with the Baltimore Ravens, he found himself running an electrical supply store in Raleigh. Arena league teams were calling. Soon enough, one of those teams – the Albany Firebirds – owned his rights. His NFL dream was all but dead.

Without Nate Hobgood-Chittick, Saturday's college roommate at UNC and a bit player on the Colts' 1998 roster, it probably would have died for good. Jeff Saturday ended up playing 197 games in Colts blue. Without Hobgood-Chittick walking into the office of Colts President Bill Polian late that season and telling him about the college teammate of his who did nothing but whip a bunch of first-rounders every day in practice, he wouldn't have played one.

Greg Ellis? Brian Simmons? Vonnie Holliday? All defensive stars for the Tar Heels. All first-round picks in '98. All humbled every day on the practice fields in Chapel Hill by Saturday, a two-time team captain and All-ACC center who waited, and waited, and waited, and never heard his name called on draft day. He was working at an electrical supply store in North Carolina when Polian called.

The Colts worked him out on a single strip of turf at the old RCA Dome in January 1999. They gave him a shot. They promised nothing. The day Saturday arrived for training camp, offensive line coach Howard Mudd mistook him for a long snapper.

"Honestly, I thought I'd just be a camp body," Saturday says now, laughing. "Odds of me making the roster weren't very high."

He played 11 games at guard that season. He played the next 12 years at center.

Saturday's skill set never flashed; the beauty, instead, came in his ingenuity. Undersized, with those short, stubby arms, Saturday mastered the fundamentals: leverage, footwork, technique. Like the quarterback he snapped the football to in 181 games, he played as much with his body as he did his mind. Like Peyton Manning, Jeff Saturday played between the ears.

"It was never about the games," Saturday explains. "It was about the six days leading up to the game."

In his 12 seasons in Indianapolis, Saturday was every bit the Iron Man Peyton Manning and Reggie Wayne were. No surprise, then, that he now sits fifth in franchise history in games played (197) and third in wins (132). He was the Scottie Pippen to Manning's Michael Jordan, the instrumental supporting actor whose quiet consistency made the superstar's brilliance possible.

"One of those guys you never, never have to worry about," says Colts kicker and former Saturday teammate Adam Vinatieri. "If you're lucky enough to have a bunch of Jeff Saturdays in your locker room, you're going to win a lot of games. A lot of games."

Together, Saturday and Manning sniffed out the blitzes and called the audibles that allowed the league's most lethal offense to hum for more than a decade. They argued on the sideline. ("Just because he was the quarterback doesn't mean I wasn't going to tell him what I thought was best for our football team," Saturday says of his infamous dust-up with Manning.) They celebrated a Super Bowl win in the rain in Miami. They won a heck of a lot of football games.

Saturday lasted in Indianapolis until March 2012, when the Colts overhauled their roster and bid farewell to so many franchise stalwarts. He played one season in Green Bay before retiring. Later that spring, he signed a ceremonial one-day contract with the Colts. It was the only appropriate way for Saturday to go out – in blue and white.

At halftime of Monday's game, he'll see his name etched alongside some of the greatest in Indianapolis Colts history. Imagine that: from a gas station to the Ring of Honor.

Beyond the championship and the wins and the years that helped remake Indianapolis into a football town, Saturday notes a personal highlight. It came in that monkey-off-the-back 2006 AFC Championship Game triumph over New England. Lost amid Manning's magic and Marlin Jackson's game-sealing interception that night was Saturday's punishing pancake block of Patriots 325-pound defensive tackle Vince Wilfork on the game-winning touchdown run by Joseph Addai.

A semi could've plowed through that hole. Addai did, with ease, and the Colts won 38-34.

John Elway has The Drive. Dwight Clark has The Catch. Jeff Saturday has The Block.

In that play was Saturday's career. Too small? Too short? Pumping freakin' gas the rest of his life?

Sometimes in football the measurables don't matter.

With Jeff Saturday they never did.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.