Azusa Pacific’s Aoga Aims for His Big Shot at the NFL

Neo Aoga stepped onto the Azusa Pacific campus in August and blocked every space of football Coach Pete Shinnick’s office door. Aoga was 6 feet 3, weighed 308 pounds and wanted to play quarterback.

And that is far from being the most interesting thing about him.

Aoga is 26 years old and is the father of a 3-year-old son named Charles and a 1-year-old daughter named Regina. He didn’t play a lick of football until his senior year at Long Beach Poly High, then went to Utah for two years and thought it was OK to wear shorts and flip-flops in the snow.

Aoga then wound up at Long Beach City College for two years, leading the team to a national title, spent a semester at NCAA Division II Missouri Western State and spent 2 1/2 years working as a bank teller and eating his mother’s cooking.

But what people wanted to know most was the feeling of stepping on the scale one day and watching the numbers go over 300 pounds with few signs of stopping. Few signs until Aoga, wide-eyed and in shock, saw that he weighed 318 pounds. “That’s kind of scary,” Aoga says.

And so Aoga has come to be known as the biggest quarterback anyone has ever met, whether he likes it or not.

Aoga knows what he wants now. He wants to be an NFL quarterback first and then a football coach. He wants to use this final shot at Azusa Pacific to prove he is disciplined and serious. He wants to show he has an arm so strong that throwing a football 70 yards on the fly is as easy to him as tossing a softball across the driveway. He wants to show everyone he has feet so quick that he could dance a Texas six-step instead of a two-step.

Before defending NAIA national champion Azusa Pacific played Western Oregon on Saturday night, Aoga had completed 67 of 129 passes for 1,086 yards and six touchdowns. All this after a 2 1/2-year hiatus.

Although Aoga doesn’t want his weight to be the defining characteristic of his final season of collegiate football, he also is not embarrassed. “I was always a big kid,” he says while sitting in Shinnick’s office. Aoga is wearing baggy jeans, an oversized surfer shirt and a Michigan cap. “I weigh an honest 278 pounds right now.”

NFL scouts who have come to see Azusa defensive back Jack Williams, a senior who is being projected as a fourth-round NFL pick, have told Shinnick Aoga would have to weigh 250 before any team would let him come to a camp. “I can do that,” Aoga says. “It’s just a matter of eating right and working out. I hadn’t been doing that for a couple of years.”

At Long Beach Poly, Aoga played baseball. “I only threw a football in the street for fun,” he says. At the start of his senior year, a coach approached Aoga and asked him to play football. “I’d never seen a playbook, never put on pads,” Aoga says, “and they made me the starting quarterback.”

Aoga weighed about 215 pounds, he thinks, and mostly because of arm strength and foot quickness, Utah offered him a football scholarship. “I never expected that,” he says. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

As a Proposition 48 student, Aoga had to sit out his freshman season, unable to even practice with the team. As a sophomore, he sat out as a redshirt. So after playing one season of football as a high school senior, Aoga spent two years not playing or learning much about the game.

He saw snow for the first time and went out in his shorts. “I roomed with three guys from Hawaii and we had one pair of boots between us that we shared,” Aoga says.

Terribly homesick, Aoga gave up his scholarship and went home to Long Beach after his sophomore year, working at Knott’s Berry Farm. Finally a coach from Long Beach City College approached him and asked if he wanted to play football again. In two seasons, Aoga set 11 school records and once threw for 460 yards in a game. Because his NCAA Division I eligibility had expired, Aoga went off to Missouri Western.

“Talk about culture shock,” Aoga says. “The first time I heard tornado sirens, I thought they were church bells.” After a semester, where he missed four games because of knee injury, Aoga came home again with no thoughts of football. He started a family with fiance Kim Agaalii. For 2 1/2 years Aoga worked as a bank teller and helped out as a volunteer coach at Long Beach City College. It was there, in the weight room last spring, that Williams ran into Aoga.

Williams knew the Cougars were short of quarterbacks and he figured out that Aoga still had a semester of eligibility remaining, according to NAIA rules. He brought the giant quarterback to school. Shinnick thought Aoga was an offensive lineman. Indeed, Aoga is the second-biggest player on the roster. Only offensive tackle Brad Baker, 6-1, 320, is larger than Aoga.

Shinnick can’t say enough good things about how quick Aoga’s feet move and how accurate he throws. What Aoga needs to prove now is his desire to play pro football badly enough to keep losing weight. “Last time I weighed 250,” Aoga figures, “I was still at Utah.” A long time ago in a faraway place.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.