When you look at Barry Gardner today, you might see a seventh-year NFL linebacker challenging for a starting spot on his third professional team.

You might also see a recent signee of the New York Jets who has started 23 of the 94 games he has played in, making 183 tackles at linebacker and on special teams while learning under the likes of NFL head coaches Andy Reid and Butch Davis.

And if you know a little bit of history, you see a former First-Team All-Big Ten selection who finished his career second on Northwestern’s all-time tackles list and impressed scouts enough to be drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles with the 35th pick in 1999.

But buried somewhere beneath all those NFL tackles and starts, those college honors and accolades, is a young man in Pasadena, Calif. — a young man trying to figure out how he arrived at one of college football’s most hallowed grounds.

A young man who just two years before was an undersized offensive lineman with no Division I scholarship offers, but who in 1996 defended kickoffs in NU’s first Rose Bowl in almost 50 years, catapulting himself to a successful NFL career.

“At that point in my career I was just excited about whatever happened,” said Gardner, nearly 10 years after he toed the Rose Bowl’s turf as a redshirt freshman in the Wildcats’ 41-32 loss to USC. “It was kind of like a fairy tale ride, in a sense, because it’s something that you dream of.

“I had a big hit on a kickoff. The highlight of the game for me was that hit. That was pretty much it.”

But the players and coaches around Gardner knew that wasn’t it. Not for the player who moonlighted as a security guard so he could afford tuition, the man who refused to give in to what was easy by taking on less challenging academics or a quicker path to the football field.

Gardner, a 1994 graduate of Thornton High School in nearby Harvey, Ill., walked on to NU’s campus as an education-first student. A 6-foot-1, 220-pound student, to be sure, but a student who was blazing more trails in the classroom — he would become the first in his family with a college degree — than on the gridiron. There, Gardner had no guarantee of playing time, nor a scholarship, nor anything.

But Gardner said he wasn’t looking for a guarantee. He wanted the best and nothing less.

“I like to challenge myself,” Gardner said. “I could have (gone) to a D-II school or a D-III school. But if I’m going to do something, then I like to do it against the best, because that’s how people are going to judge you when it comes time to get a job or when it comes time to play NFL football.”

As an inconspicuous walk-on who needed a new position, the time to play in “the league,” as he calls it, was far away from 1994.

“You know what? I didn’t even know who he was,” said coach Gary Barnett, who guided NU’s Rose Bowl season and was the Cats’ coach until he left for Colorado in 1999.

Barnett and his staff worked mostly with the veterans and scholarship freshmen throughout the season, leaving Gardner to make his transition from offense to defense — which his size and 40 time dictated — while on scout-team duty.

But when Barnett met with his players after the season, the coach quickly learned of a certain freshman who brought an infectious enthusiasm to the practice field.

“All the older guys that I met with said to me, ‘Coach, you’ve really got a special guy in Barry Gardner,'” Barnett said. “(They) told me what a leader he was in the locker room and how much people admired him.

“I started figuring then that maybe I had something, and I think that’s when we really started working with him at linebacker. We didn’t have any idea what kind of player he’d make himself into, but we knew he was a leader and you can’t have enough of those.”

So Gardner got a scholarship before the 1995 season, and his hard work earned him time on the field in 11 games, including perhaps the biggest game in NU history.

After that moment, though, Gardner cleaned his slate. Each year was a new year, he said, and brought on different things.

Like his first career start in 1996. And a First-Team All-Big Ten selection in 1997. And finally the nation’s tackles title in 1998, punctuated by his third consecutive Academic All-Big Ten honor.

All this while NU’s program was sliding downhill, bottoming out in Gardner’s final season as the Cats went 3-9 and 0-8 in the Big Ten.

Still, Gardner was drafted higher than any NU player since guard Matt O’Dwyer in 1995.

Ron Vanderlinden, who served as NU’s defensive coordinator and linebackers coach from 1992 to 1996, said with all those accolades it was no wonder Gardner still is in the middle of a longer-than-average NFL career with the Eagles, Jets and Cleveland Browns.

“He’s a great locker room guy,” said Vanderlinden, now the linebackers coach at Penn State. “He’s willing to excel and do well in special teams, and the fact that he’s smart and he can learn all three linebacker positions — those are three of his values in the NFL.

“(Another thing) Barry had a lot of was shock. When he hit you, you were hit. There wasn’t much forward movement after Barry squared you up.”

Gardner used that shock for one big hit in the Big Game, a hit that quickly washed away amid the performances of Darnell Autry and D’Wayne Bates.

But Gardner’s other shock came more gradually. The shock of watching an undersized high school lineman with no college in his family history graduate from Northwestern and make an even rarer leap into the NFL as an imposing linebacker and selfless special-teamer.

“I just worked my butt off,” Gardner said. “I worked my butt off in the classroom, I worked my butt off in the weight room, I worked my butt off on the field and I let the rest take care of itself.”

Reach Patrick Dorsey at [email protected].