Hawaii running back and kick returner Paul Harris had $200, a highlights tape and not much else when he arrived in southern California to play junior-college football in the summer of 2013.
The football dreams of the scrappy kid from Columbus were fading. His career was on its last legs, the victim of classroom struggles, the folding of a program and a load of student debt.
But Harris, a 2011 Marion-Franklin graduate, still had hope. That tape had made its way to Steve Mooshagian, a former Cincinnati Bengals assistant who ran the program at Ventura Junior College and is an old friend of Hawaii coach Norm Chow.