It's all for moments like this one, all those nights spent in forgettable Courtyards in Hattiesburg, Miss., and Statesboro, Ga., and Orangeburg, S.C., facetiming the kids back home instead of tucking them in himself. All those miles put on his Toyota 4Runner, all those campuses, all those prospects, all those reports to file – almost 300 each fall – across four grueling months. All those Sundays spent in some sports bar in some southern town, iPad stocked with film to watch, propped up on the table in front of him, the team he’s working for playing a game 800 miles north while he sits there, watching on a TV screen.

All that for this: Clock ticking, card due, draft room at odds, boss’s eyes locked on him, asking a simple question that needs a very immediate, very convincing answer.

“Is he tough enough?”

Tick, tick, tick...

“He’s tough enough – trust me,” Jamie Moore tells Chris Ballard, and Ballard believes him, because he knows Moore’s been grinding on this prospect for three years, ever since he heard his coach raving on some Sirius XM channel about the South Florida kid who erupted for 275 yards and four touchdowns in his first college game.

Tick, tick, tick...

He was recruited to play safety at UCLA, Moore tells him. Was all-state at two positions in high school, Moore tells him. Averaged more than 6 yards a carry in college, Moore tells him. Was so talented the coaches wanted him playing offense and defense.

But the room isn’t unanimous. There are other running backs in play. They debate. Moore states his case. Others do the same. Ballard thinks.

Tick, tick, tick...

More:5 things for Colts fans to watch closely at NFL Combine this week

More:What you need to know about the NFL Combine in Indianapolis

He sides with Moore. Turns in the card. Marlon Mack becomes an Indianapolis Colt. Hurts his shoulder in his first training camp but plays 14 games anyway. Busts out a year later, rushing for 908 yards and nine touchdowns in 12 starts. Goes for a franchise playoff record 148 in the win in Houston.

Moore was right. Mack was tough enough. A fourth-round pick becomes a franchise’s running back of the future.

“You gotta be driven to find players, that’s why you do the job,” explains Moore, the Colts’ southeast area scout. “If you’re just driving around, writing reports, looking at guys, what are you doing? You’re just collecting Marriott points. It’s about finding players. There are two types of scouts: Guys that go out there and see what everyone else thinks, and the guys who can see through the fog, have conviction, and aren’t scared to like a player and put themselves on the line.

“Because when you walk in our (draft) room, you better have alligator skin. It’s not all nice-nice.”

Finding Darius Leonard

Jamie Moore can see through the fog. He’s willing to put himself on the line. He’s swung. He’s missed. The man who trained him in the business, Hall of Famer Bill Polian, told him a million times: If you’re batting 50 percent, you’re doing a hell of a job.

Moore, 37, remembers standing in his kitchen in Jacksonville, two summers back, scouring through film on his iPad when a fiery linebacker from a forgettable school leapt off the tape. Moore watched one game. Then another. Then another. Then he told himself he had to go see Darius Leonard live.

And that’s where the Colts first uncovered the 2018 Defensive Rookie of the Year: from Jamie Moore’s kitchen.

More:Defensive Rookie of the Year Darius Leonard: 'I definitely surprised myself'

A few months later, the scout stood on the sideline during warmups for a Thursday night game at North Carolina Central, figuring Leonard – whom he’d met earlier in the week – would come say hello. Moore relishes the intimacy of the sidelines; he loves seeing how a player interacts with coaches and teammates in the heat of battle. “If you get the guy right,” Moore explains, “you get the player right.”

Darius Leonard never came over and said hello that night.

“This guy’s warming up, and he’s got the eye of the tiger, man,” Moore remembers thinking. “Just dialed in. That’s when I started to see he’s different.”

Moore’s gut was right. So was Ballard’s. The Colts grabbed the South Carolina State product in the second round of April’s draft, heard some skeptics chastise the pick, then watched Leonard lead the entire league in tackles and become the first Colts’ defensive rookie named first-team All-Pro in six decades.

Good thing Jamie Moore was watching film in his kitchen that day. Good thing he kept his eye on Darius Leonard.

But that was last year. The 2019 NFL Draft is two months away. Moore is one of 20-plus members of the Colts’ personnel staff – from Ballard, the third-year GM, all the way down to the area scouts like Moore – who spent 18 straight days at the team facility this February, slogging through 12-hour sessions, mining thousands of prospects down into the select few they want to become an Indianapolis Colt.

They got to work at 7:30 each morning, though assistant GM Ed Dodds was there to get them going about 7:28. Moore loves the grind. This is all he’s ever wanted to do.

A cornerback for Tiffin University in the early 2000s who was never gonna sniff the pros, he turned an injured sophomore season into a crash course in Scouting 101. “Can I help?” Moore begged his head coach a few days after he broke his scapula in practice and spent a night in the hospital. “I love ball. I wanna coach. I wanna scout. I don’t wanna just fill up water bottles and hang out at practice.”

Sure, the coach said. Go find us some recruits.

So Moore did. He sent out questionnaires to high schools, watched the scratchy VHS tapes that came in, wrote up reports and threw everything into a database. At the end of the season, he presented his findings to the coaching staff. They were floored.

Moore had found his passion. Now all he had to do was find a job.

Two years later, after graduation, and after a fruitless networking trip to the Senior Bowl, Moore was fixing busted car parts at a Toyota plant in northeast Ohio, telling himself the NFL just wasn’t gonna work. He emailed every college recruiting director he could find. Emailed CFL and AFL teams. Options were thin. Hope was too.

Finally – a call. From Ball State. From the new head coach, Brady Hoke, who had created a position that has since become customary on college football coaching staffs: the recruiting assistant. Moore was giddy. “I had to sign this paper that said I was willingly working more hours than I was legally allowed to,” he says 18 years later, laughing at the big break that got his career rolling.

Two years later he was sitting in a room with Bill Parcells, interviewing for a scouting job with the Dallas Cowboys.

“I’ve coached six guys in my career from Ball State,” Parcells told him. “Can you name them?”

Moore knew his stuff. He got five. Parcells didn’t kick him out of the room. Whew.

A week later, Moore interviewed with Polian, then the Colts’ president, and his No. 2, Tom Telesco. He’s been with the team since.

'A humbling process'

He can't tell you how many nights he spends on the road each year, but let’s just call it August through Thanksgiving. Even when he’s on vacation, Moore is dialing up audiobooks on scouting, like his all-time favorite, the baseball classic "Dollar Sign on the Muscle," a book he convinced Ballard to dig into last year.

He showed up to the third day of the draft two years ago in a khaki suit, black shirt, no tie. His new boss looked him up and down. “What are you wearing?” Ballard asked. “You look like a mobster.” Moore laughed. “I got married in this suit. Good things happen in this suit.”

A few hours later, wearing the mobster suit, Moore convinced the GM Marlon Mack was the pick at No. 143.

Thirteen years with the Colts, and three prospects he's scouted stick out: Mack, the speedy RB1 who blossomed during his sophomore season; Leonard, the diamond-in-the-rough Defensive Rookie of the Year; and Anthony Castonzo, the team’s starter at left tackle the past eight seasons. Moore scouted Castonzo way back in 2010, his first full year on the road, and pitched him in the draft room to Polian, the man who’d trained him. Castonzo has started 116 games since, and is the last Polian draft pick on the current roster.

“To me,” Moore says of Castonzo, “he’s one of those guys that I don’t know will ever be fully appreciated for what he’s been and who he is.”

If Mack proved a prospect worth fighting for – especially during those tense minutes in the draft room – Leonard might end up being the first line on Moore’s résumé. The Maniac was everything that was right about the Indianapolis Colts in 2018: relentlessly productive, stunningly humble, precisely the player you can build around. Moore was the one who found him, watched him, studied him, interviewed him, pushed for him, then told everyone not to spend a minute worrying about those saying an FCS linebacker wouldn’t last in the pros.

“Jamie did a tremendous job scouting Darius Leonard,” Ballard says, “just a tremendous job.”

It was Dodds, Ballard’s No. 2, who gathered the group before the 2018 Draft and offered a peptalk. They’d done the work, watched the tape, stacked their board. The Colts had 11 picks, and they felt ready. This was the draft that would reshape their franchise’s future. “We knew,” Moore says, looking back. “We knew going in we had such a good game plan.”

The payoff: one of the best draft hauls, by any team, in recent memory. Moore starts by crediting the man at the top.

“He’s tremendous,” he says of Ballard. “I tell people this all the time, because of the nature of this profession, there are so many egos. And it’s insane to me, because I think the talent evaluation process is a humbling process. You’re gonna be wrong. You’re gonna make mistakes. No one bats 1.000. Chris has a level of humility, he doesn’t take himself too serious, and Ed’s very humble. They’re fun to work for.”

The job isn’t always fun. It can be miserable. It can be a slog. It can be hotel rooms in New Jersey amid a 2-14 season, another school, another game, another report to file on a prospect who’ll never sniff the NFL. “It can be hard, man,” Moore says. “But you gotta keep laser focus. Everything around you is negative, the team is struggling, but the best thing about our job is we’re in the solution business. You’re always thinking next year. I remember 2011, all those losses, sitting in some hotel, eating breakfast, reading the USA TODAY and seeing a picture of this quarterback out at Stanford, Andrew Luck. I was like, ‘Man, I hope this guy’s good, because we might end up taking him...’”

Eighteen days of meetings have come to a close. The NFL Combine is this week. Pro days soon. The draft two months away. Thousands of miles on his car, hundreds of nights in hotel rooms, a year’s worth of work, winnowed down to a few, fleeting moments, clock ticking, card due, boss’s eyes locked on him, looking for answers.

Jamie Moore isn’t scared. This is all he's ever wanted to do.

“It’s that conviction,” he says. “It takes courage. It takes guts. I always have said if you’ve done the work, you have the belief. I trust my eyes. I trust my intuition. I trust my instincts.”

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