Though his knees ached all the time, he didn't say anything to coaches or trainers. Like other players, he said, he took pain pills to get through Mendenhall's brutal practices. He often got prescriptions from doctors outside the football program who knew he was a BYU player. Sometimes, he said, they gave him more than they should have.

Driving to practice in August 2004, he blacked out and crashed into a ditch. He suffered a mild concussion but no other injuries. That same day he decided he'd had enough of the game he'd played since elementary school.

"Football was to the point that I hated it. I hated everything about it. It ruined my life," he said.

Scott Atkinson recalls his son phoning with the news.

"Dad, I'm going to quit football. Football is not worth my life," he said.

"I was just in shock," said Scott Atkinson, who played baseball and basketball at BYU in the 1970s. He didn't know the extent of his son's battle with painkillers.

Bryant Atkinson didn't think of himself as an addict when he quit the team. He thought of himself as someone who needed medication for his banged-up knees.

"Obviously, you get introduced to it that way. It's hard to say. I can't blame it on that," he said. But he concedes taking pain pills escalated after his third knee surgery.

It didn't help that Mindy also had a steady supply.

"He just started taking them a lot. He was really depressed. His body wasn't feeling good. He was hurting. His life was out of whack," said Mindy Atkinson, 24, who has known Bryant since seventh grade.

Within six months, Lortab, Percocet and OxyContin became a daily ritual. Atkinson's knees still hurt, but he didn't take pills to ease the pain, though that's the impression he gave physicians who prescribed the drugs. He used them to get high.

"You find out which doctors don't ask questions," Atkinson said.

Doctors weren't his only source.

Atkinson bought Lortab online after moving back to his parents' Provo home. The pills showed up in FedEx packages. Scott Atkinson confronted his son about the deliveries, but he denied they were drugs. The packages stopped arriving after that, at least to the house. Bryant Atkinson had them marked for pickup at the FedEx office instead.

"We found Lortab by the hundreds," Scott Atkinson said, estimating he flushed some 400 to 500 tablets down the toilet.

Bryant Atkinson's habit quickly became expensive. One OxyContin 80 goes for $40 to $60 on the street. Atkinson was taking 10 a day "just to stay out of withdrawals."

He said he can't remember how he paid for the pills, but in his drug circle buying and selling was common.

All that came to an end last March when Atkinson and his wife were arrested in their Provo apartment in what amounted to a fluke they now consider a blessing.