After last Sunday’s AFC Championship game, however, when he broke up two potential game-winning touchdown passes, every New England fan knows his name.
Whether they’d recognize him at Best Buy is another story entirely; Moore joked Sunday night that he probably could still walk through the store anonymously.
The funny thing is that, once upon a time (don’t all Cinderella stories start that way?), Moore was employed by Best Buy in Pittsburg, Calif., and as he tweeted on that November day, “4 years ago I woulda been happy to answer ur questions.’’
It was around that same time frame that Moore’s football journey began. He started playing the game only as a senior in high school, and began his college career at Laney College, a junior college close to home, in Oakland.
He was an All-JUCO pick in California, but bigger programs weren’t exactly beating down his door. One of the programs he received an offer from, Hofstra, wound up dropping its football program.
But fortunately for Moore, Southern Methodist defensive backs coach Derrick Odum saw him, and liked what he saw.
“I looked at the film and I said, ‘This guy, he can play the game. I’m taking him,’ ’’ Odum said yesterday. “And I got a lot of flak from some of the people that are around the program, as far as he wasn’t a highly recruited guy and that type of thing.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how he’s ranked but the guy can play the game and that’s all I go off of.’ We took him and from day one he did a great job for us.’’
It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Moore at SMU. When he was on the field, he was a standout, with 19 pass breakups and 22 passes defensed in two seasons. But he played in just eight games as a senior, sustaining a left knee injury that required three surgeries in two years (his kneecap kept popping out of place).
Last spring, Moore’s injury history scared teams; he went undrafted.
