Josh Johnson, Emergency Quarterback

Less than a full day after watching the Indianapolis Colts win a close game from the sideline—where he waited in uniform, ready to fill in at quarterback should misfortune befall Matt Hasselbeck, who was already filling in for injured starter Andrew Luck—Josh Johnson was cut. For the second time in a week, in fact. Only Johnson didn't have much time to feel disappointed, not with the Buffalo Bills on the phone the next day, calling before he could even hop a flight back to his hometown of Oakland, California.

By Tuesday, Johnson was in Buffalo, signing a contract and getting ready for that Sunday's game against Cincinnati—the team he actually started the season with during training camp, prior to his first release of the year. And then before Johnson knew it, he was off to London the next week, to again prepare for Jacksonville, having faced the Jaguars three weeks earlier in his first game with the Colts.

At age 29, Johnson has seemingly become the NFL's most sought-after emergency quarterback: the first player teams in need of a reserve at the position ring up once injury inevitably strikes. The frequent flyer miles are nice, but Johnson's experience in the league over the past four years—a whirlwind of bouncing from team to team, sometimes even on a week-to-week basis—has giving him little else to count on.

This season alone, Johnson has been cut four times in just seven weeks; spent 10 days with the New York Jets during the last week of the preseason; performed September workouts for Philadelphia and Dallas; and signed with the Colts, twice. All told, he has been involved in 11 total transactions, a number he knows could increase at any moment.

"Anything's always possible in this business," Johnson told VICE Sports last week before the Bills-Jags game. "I guess you could say since you've been through it, it's kind of easier to know what you're going to do next.

"But I don't think not being able to do what you love ever gets easier."

There are 32 starting quarterback jobs in the NFL, and every offseason a new wave of college players enters pro football's elite workforce with dreams of earning one of them. Their odds of actually doing so are minuscule. Many former collegiate stars are stuck accepting backup duties, awaiting the remote chance for a shot at the starting gig—and even that can be a hard opportunity to come by. The league allows each team to field just 53 players, of which only 45 can dress for games. With such limited roster space, the majority of teams these days choose to take the risk and suit up just two players at unquestionably the most important position, in a sport often defined by injury.

"Generally speaking, your third quarterback really adds no value on game day from a roster standpoint," said ESPN analyst Tim Hasselbeck, brother of Colts reserve Matt, and himself a retired seven-year NFL backup quarterback. "Having a backup to the backup doesn't always seem to be something that's absolutely necessary. It ends up being, what's the chance in terms of the percentage of the guy coming in and winning the football game if by chance he has to play?"

Johnson isn't the first to live this nomadic NFL lifestyle. Depending on how it's tallied (practice squads and training camps versus actually being activated for game day), a handful of players in league history, including several quarterbacks, have played for between eight and as many as 11 franchises. Johnson has suited up for seven teams; if workouts are taken into account, he's flirted with 12 in all—more than a third of the entire NFL.

"Since I've been in the league, it's always been an up-in-the-air situation for me," says Johnson. "So my whole life I've kind of been preparing for this." His often-difficult upbringing in Oakland, the focal point of California's East Bay that almost always ranks on lists of the country's top cities for violent crime, acted as a harsh proving ground.

"I think with the different stuff you go through here, it teaches you how to be a man faster," says Delton Edwards, who coached Johnson, together with Johnson's cousin Marshawn Lynch, at Oakland Technical High School. "You taste the good and the bad, and you gotta learn how to deal with it. And I think that's what he's good at." Adds Johnson, "If you live there, you've got to expect the unexpected. You've always got to be on your toes."

So Oakland's youth seek ways to leave their beloved hometown, if only for a time, to strive for a better life. Some, like Johnson, find their path through sports. While he wasn't offered the same opportunities as the much more highly regarded Lynch, who attended nearby Cal, Johnson did make it to the University of San Diego, a Division I-AA program where he spent most of his time under the tutelage of Jim Harbaugh, now the head coach at Michigan. During his senior season, Johnson threw for nearly 3,000 yards and 43 touchdowns with only one interception, adding more than 700 rushing yards and two touchdowns on the ground. He finished third in voting for the Walter Payton Award, given to the most outstanding offensive player in Division I, and was invited to the 2008 NFL Draft Combine.

While everyone remembers running back Chris Johnson's 4.24-second 40-yard dash—still the fastest electronically clocked timed at the event—Josh (no relation to Chris), at 6-foot-3, 200 pounds, ran the top time for a quarterback, 4.55 seconds. He also had the best vertical leap among the group, at 33.5 inches. Tampa Bay selected Johnson in the fifth round of the draft, No. 160 overall.

There are few guarantees in the NFL, but Johnson's prospects appeared promising—that is, until head coach Jon Gruden was fired after the 2008 season, Johnson's rookie year, before he could even appear in a NFL game. In the offseason, new coach Raheem Morris drafted his own guy to lead the faltering franchise (another Josh, even)—Kansas State product Josh Freeman, with the 17th overall pick. After four seasons, Johnson would have just five starts with the Bucs: He won zero games, threw five touchdowns to 10 interceptions, and had a completion percentage of 54.2. In 2012, he chose to pursue free agency and, he hoped, a larger role with another team.

"Every player, the way I think, still wants to be the best at what they do," Johnson says today. "So you still work for that. It's always been my goal [to be a starter]. It always has been."

Johnson signed with San Francisco and was reunited with Harbaugh, his former college coach who had since made the jump to the pros. As the third-string QB, Johnson didn't make it out of training camp, with the 49ers keeping with the trend and opting to retain just two at the position. To keep his skills sharp and stay near home in the Bay Area, Johnson then turned to the upstart United Football League. Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be: the UFL folded that October and Johnson was once again unsure of his next move.

After overcoming a knee injury, then fruitless NFL workouts with Houston, Seattle and Chicago, Johnson closed out 2012 by finally landing with the injury-plagued Browns for the final game of their hapless 5-11 season as the new backup QB—an honorary clipboard-holder. It was then that Johnson's journeyman status began.

He spent the 2013 season in Cincinnati, appearing for mop-up duty in two games. After getting cut in the offseason, Johnson returned to the 49ers, where Harbaugh played loose with the NFL's roster limit, repeatedly catch-and-releasing Johnson—signing him early each week before cutting him ahead of the Sunday game—technically fashioning a 54th roster spot in order to have an additional quarterback for practice. Hey, good work if you can get it, and a payday of about $50,000 per week—the veteran minimum, thanks to Johnson's years of tenure in the league already.

Johnson started this season back with the Bengals, and he's been on this wild ride ever since.

"It's nothing that you have control over, it's the organization's decision," Johnson says of getting cut over and over again. "They come get you, they tell you they're moving on. That's pretty much it."

Sometimes Johnson goes and empties out his locker, sometimes he doesn't. Then the team books him a flight home, and sends whatever he doesn't collect. His first call is to his agent to regroup and look for the next chance to prove his value, which usually comes after another team has been dealt an injury to its starter. That was the case with the Jets, then the Colts, and most recently with Buffalo, when Tyrod Taylor went down with a sprained MCL.

Why teams continue coming back to Johnson in particular could be as obvious an answer as his sheer availability and willingness to keep riding this roller coaster—"You gotta stay ready, because you never know, five minutes later you can get a call," says Johnson. It might also be his growing résumé and demonstrated ability to rapidly adapt to a new playbook. "I've got a football mind," he says with a chuckle. "This is what I love to do, I feel like this is part of who I am. Things come to me when it comes to this game. It always has, I don't know why."

The only question remaining is how long Johnson is willing to persist.

"It's life, man. You're gonna get knocked down," Johnson says, also universal advice he frequently gives to Oakland kids he and Lynch help through their local charity, the Fam 1st Family Foundation. "It's the reality of it. You're not the first guy to go through it, you're not the second guy, and you won't be the last. But at the end of the day, you still got the opportunity to play a game that we all love."

"He's a competitor," Edwards said of his former star pupil. "He's always been a competitor, and he's going to keep fighting until somebody carries him away or he's closed every day. He's looking at it like, 'Hey, I'm going to keep trying until somebody says no.'"

Teams, at least for now, keep saying yes.