Adventure’s first stop: Tyler Kuder’s NFL odyssey began at Idaho gas station

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GREEN BAY, Wis. — Tyler Kuder didn’t know his life was about to be changed forever. What he did know was that he had a four-hour drive ahead of him, his tank was on E, and he and his buddies were hungry.

Five and a half years later, as he sat in the Green Bay Packers locker room looking at his green No. 90 nearby and thinking about how nervous he was going to be the first time he met Aaron Rodgers, Kuder was asked about the long odds he faces to make the team’s 53-man roster this summer. A knowing smile crept across his face.

“I believe in miracles,” the undrafted rookie free-agent nose tackle said. “And being in the right place at the right time.”

He should, because there is no better way to explain how he’s gotten this far.

In the fall of 2010, Kuder’s football career was over before it started. After drawing attention from Oregon, Washington State, Boise State and others as a high-school junior in Payette, Idaho, those schools took one look at his grade-point average and backed away. He wound up signing with Idaho, but after his ACT score was too low to qualify, that opportunity dried up, too.

So instead of playing college football, Kuder was spending a couple hard-earned days off from his construction job road-tripping to Idaho State with a few friends. Their weekend of fun over, they stopped just before the Interstate 15 North on-ramp at the Maverik gas station on East Center Street in Pocatello. Maverik, a Salt Lake City-based chain of roughly 270 gas stations and convenience stores in the western United States, bills itself as Adventure’s First Stop.

Academic issues took Tyler Kuder from a major recruit to having to walk on at FCS Idaho State, but the nose tackle now has his NFL chance. Loren Orr/Getty Images

For Kuder, that’s exactly what it was on his odyssey to the NFL.

At the same Maverik station was Nick Whitworth, a former Idaho State assistant who’d recruited Kuder in high school before the bigger schools got …

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