The news comes during the dying days of August. A phone call, a tap on the shoulder in the locker room, an unambiguous visit from that scrawny kid with the clipboard. Players call him—each of him, in his varying forms—the Grim Reaper, the Turk. The Turk does not deliver the news, but he delivers news that there is news. On cut days, there are several ways to get the news, but the news is always the same, and the news is never good.

Every year, just before Labor Day, the preseason rosters of all thirty-two NFL teams are slashed from ninety players to a lean fifty-three. This means that of the 2,900 players who sign contracts for NFL training camp each summer, just over 1,700 are left standing on the sidelines during Week 1. Over the duration of the preseason, coaches and front-office management make it known, in a refrain that is both an inspiration and a threat, that no spots are secure: Rookies have a shot at supplanting veterans; undrafted no-names contend to steal roster slots from first- and second-rounders out of Alabama and Michigan. Some players get hurt along the way; others get dropped in short order. There is a saying in the NFL that everyone is needed but no one is necessary. For the majority of players, especially those on the bubble, who cling with a crimp grip to their long odds, fate hangs uncertain right up until the end of summer—when team rosters are cut first from ninety to seventy-five, and then from seventy-five to fifty-three. Those cut days often determine whether someone can, for the season, call himself a professional football player or merely a super-fit guy with famous friends.

The Long Road to a Long Shot

© Condé Nast

That’s pretty much how Anthony Armstrong describes the stakes at the end of August. He’d know—he’s 30, been through eight camps, seven years of pro football, six different teams. He’s started thirteen games in the NFL but has also been cut seven times. This spring he was picked up by the Dallas Cowboys, his hometown team, and, after a couple of workouts with rookies and unsigned players, invited to official training camp in mid-July.

The routes to an NFL roster are tangled with permutations, nearly as many possibilities as there are players. Roughly 250 college players are drafted each April, which leaves many thousands of hopefuls who are not. Armstrong was not drafted—not even close. He grew up in Carrollton, Texas, outside Dallas. He played under Friday-night lights in a stadium of 13,000 and then played college football in a panhandle town, Canyon, whose total population was about the same. He was a standout receiver at West Texas AM, but, he says, I’d always been told, coming out of Division II, that you have to dominate everybody around you to make it into the NFL. He did not dominate. Nor did he much impress the one NFL scout who called him for a tryout after his senior season. He stayed in Canyon another year to finish his degree.

I was just sitting in a room drinking beer every day and playing Madden, he says. It was pretty boring, pretty upsetting, honestly. But I broke out of that, and I started playing some flag football with some friends again. That was all it took. I had the drive again to go out there and compete.

This was the spring of ’06. He’d been offered a job selling insurance—an offer he figured wouldn’t spoil like football. But I was healthy, wanted to play still. So I called that one and only scout I knew, asked him to bring me back in. I didn’t know how the process worked! But a teammate of mine, I’d heard he had an agent, and that you needed an agent to get on a team. That agent knew a guy down in Odessa.