His team was a chaotic punchline. Then he found a new place in the sport.

It’s unlikely that the fortunes of the University of Louisville football team will rise and fall on the crouched legs of Mario Agyen, a 6-foot-4, 190-pound walk-on running back who retired midway through last season after quitting at the team came. -summer trial.

But despite the daily reminders of where he stands in the team’s hierarchy of 114 players, Agyen rarely forgets the distance he traveled to get there. Five years ago, he left his home in the Bronx with little more than a duffel bag filled with clothes, $1.98 in his pocket. bank account and an inexhaustible amount of determination to become a college football player.

Now, every morning when he takes the elevator to the football commissary, he chooses what kind of egg-white omelet a chef will prepare for him, and how much fresh fruit, turkey bacon, pearl sugar waffles, oatmeal or grits he wants. As he piles his plate, he often thinks about how he got started.

Agyen often woke up starving, wondering whether his breakfast would consist of one or two frozen waffles and where he would sleep at night. One time he was so hungry — and so broke — that he texted a former teacher asking if he could have some pizzas delivered.

After graduating from high school, he traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to pursue his football dream at what the rest of the country would later discover was a fake prep school operating under a name that became a national joke: Bishop Sycamore.

More than 135 players were lured by big prospects from Texas, California, Georgia and New York to play for Bishop Sycamore and its previous incarnation, Christians of Faith Academy, until it fell apart on national television.

It is believed that only one player has had a significant college football career: Agyen.

“Sometimes it blows my mind — damn, like I’ve really come a long, long way,” Agyen (pronounced A-jin) said one recent afternoon while walking around the Louisville campus. “By following the path I did and going through a mentally traumatizing experience, it could have messed me up and caused me to fall.”

Bishop Sycamore’s public unraveling, which occurred when his team was overwhelmed by powerhouse IMG Academy in a game televised on ESPN, has centered on Roy Johnson, the academy’s founder, who left behind a long trail of lies, unpaid bills, lawsuits and broken dreams. He filed for bankruptcy in July and is the focus of a recent HBO documentary, “BS High,” and a just-released book, “Friday Night Lies,” by Andrew King, a journalist, and Ben Ferree, a former Ohio high-school athletics researcher.

Agyen and his childhood friend Isaiah Miller make cameos in the documentary, part of a group of players recruited from the Bronx whose experiences were chronicled in The New York Times nearly two years ago.

At the time, many were trying to get their lives back on track after their experiences at Christians of Faith in 2018, a first season in which dozens of teenage boys lived as football bums. They were kicked out of two hotels, stayed in cabins at a rural retreat with no phone reception, and then into an apartment complex where they slept on air mattresses in empty units.

The rest of their experience was no less chaotic. They were educated through online learning accounts, but no one monitored their work. On what would have been the first day of classes, they went on a field trip to play paintball. They were given key cards to a health club, but never returned to use them. Fights broke out between the players and even the coaches.

The mother of one of the players did her best to put together meals, while a handful of players resorted to stealing food from supermarkets.

The football was equally sloppy, with players sharing helmets and no coach treating injuries.

When that season ended in early November when Christians of Faith forfeited a game at St. Frances Academy in Baltimore due to a lack of players, the remaining players returned home to pick up the pieces.

However, Agyen did not want to return to the Bronx.

He had been through too much by then. Coming home and getting a deportation notice. Sleeping on the floor or the couch. Old classmates in jail or worse. He could picture a friend lying in a coffin and thinking, “This is the environment we grew up in. It’s a cycle — like a box that we’re trapped in.”

He has never let go of the fact that football is his lifeline.

Agyen, the son of Ghanaian immigrants who split up when he was 10, has long carried himself with the exuberance of a puppy and the determination of a pit bull to prove himself to all who doubted him. From an early age, Agyen had pestered his father to take him to a park for training.

“Football is everything,” his father, Kofi Agyen, a taxi driver, said with a laugh. “He sleeps football. He wakes up and thinks about football.”

The sport gave him direction. His mother, Nana Gyamfi, who worked as a housekeeper at a hotel, said she fled Ghana in 1991 after the assassination of her father, an anti-government minister. She emphasized education so that her two children — Mario and his older sister, Angel — would have a better life. But for a long time, Mario wasn’t as interested in his class work as he was in being the center of attention.

“We went back and forth — he was such a clown,” says Tara Tripaldi, his sixth-grade teacher at Middle School 363 in the Bronx, who has remained close to him. “But you could see his hunger, his passion for the sport. Once he started seeing the connections between academics and college, he started killing it.

Agyen, an outstanding student at the University of Louisville, is expected to graduate in December with a degree in sports management.

He had never been to Kentucky and didn’t know anyone in Louisville. He chose the school after two years at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for a simple reason: The recruiting coordinator, Pete Nochta, answered his emails.

Just as Bishop Sycamore was making headlines two years ago, Agyen tried his hand at Louisville. Shortly afterwards, Nochta informed him that there were no stains.

Agyen was disappointed, but not discouraged.

On Saturday he sat in the stands and thought he should be on the field instead. Almost every day, he packed cones, a parachute and soccer cleats into a backpack and walked to the student recreation center and adjacent turf field, intent on proving he belonged. He ran sprints, shot around cones, lifted weights and recruited other students to fire footballs at him from close range on a squash court.

He also emailed Nochta once a week to keep in touch.

“In my head I would say, ‘Stop emailing me,’” Nochta said. “But I liked him.”

Agyen was such a fixture at the recreation center that when he recently returned with a visitor, he was twice stopped by students who hugged him. “It’s great to see your dream come true,” Michael Dropsey, who is studying sports management, told him. “I know how hard you’ve worked for this.”

College football tryouts are often nothing more than a due diligence exercise. Schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football, have 85 full scholarships to hand out. They also have room for 35 walk-ons, with many spots reserved for local high school standouts, legacy prospects or prospects who might need to put some meat on their bones. There’s not much room for anyone else.

“Usually the guys who show up for a tryout are 250 pounds and they want to play receiver,” Nochta said. “Or you have guys who look like they should be in an inpatient unit. Usually you don’t find guys you can bring in to compete with DI players and not let anyone get hurt.

When the next tryout came a year later, Agyen looked the part of a football player, drawing attention from teammates who stopped to watch. But days passed without a word. Then a few weeks. On Sept. 27, with Louisville’s running back depth depleted by injury four games into the season, Agyen got a message from Nochta’s assistant, Carter Wilson: Call me.

Agyen left a sports law class and called Wilson, who told him there was a spot for him. Agyen cried before hanging up.

Agyen impressed the scout team almost immediately, breaking off a few long runs against the starting defense. Near the end of the regular season, he received the scout team difference maker award. When Louisville defeated Cincinnati in a bowl game at Boston’s Fenway Park, he took the field for the first time and carried the ball for no gain on the penultimate play of the game.

There is no statistical record of his carry, which was attributed to a defensive player wearing the same uniform number, although his roster page was recently updated to make note of this. That the mistake has not been corrected is perhaps a sign of his position in the program.

Another reason is that he has to prove himself again with a new coaching staff.

Chris Barclay, the running backs coach under first-year head coach Jeff Brohm, describes Agyen as smart, meticulous and a hard worker who “likes to know the why.” Agyen showed flashes in fall camp of the craftiness that helped him run for more than 3,500 yards in high school. But blocking Atlantic Coast Conference pass rushers is a challenge because of his size, Barclay said, adding that Agyen’s best chance to contribute will be on special teams — something he did last week during the romp over Murray State , along with another non-profit carry.

(Agyen was not on the 70-man roster for Louisville’s first two away games, including the season opener against rival Georgia Tech and Saturday’s game scheduled against Indiana in Indianapolis.)

“He’s had to earn everything his whole life,” Barclay said. “I’ve been around guys like that and they find a way to get on the field and help the team win games.”

Barclay and many others at Louisville only recently learned about Agyen’s journey through the documentary. Jawhar Jordan, the starting running back who quickly bonded with Agyen as a Long Island native and a mid-career joiner of the program, said Agyen was initially reluctant to talk about his experience at Christians of Faith.

“When you watch the documentary, wow, it’s sad,” Jordan said. “But he comes here every day with a smile on his face. He never gave up. He kept chasing the dream. People deserve to hear his story.”

In June, Agyen, wearing a charcoal jacket, pink shirt and loafers, walked the red carpet for a screening of “BS High” at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. He met Michael Strahan, one of the film’s producers. Spencer Paysinger, like Strahan a Super Bowl champion with the Giants and another of the film’s financiers, urged Agyen to capitalize on his status as a football player at Louisville by making business connections.

“I’m the first in my family to walk the red carpet,” Agyen said, laughing. “You walk in and all these people are looking at you, there’s lights flashing, cameras, everything. You feel like a celebrity.”

At the end of the screening, Agyen was rewarded with thunderous applause when the audience saw where he was in the credits. The only thing better, he thinks, is to elicit another one, on a bigger stage this season.