From Oregon farmland to San Francisco, Broncos’ Talanoa Hufanga looks to make Denver his next “great fit”

The call pinged across Scott Sanders’ phone Monday night, digits forever seared into his brain because Talanoa Hufanga hasn’t changed his phone number since high school.

Sanders, Hufanga’s former high school football coach at Crescent Valley in Corvallis, Ore., shot him a text earlier that day to check in as NFL free agency unfolded. This wasn’t unusual. Hufanga has returned to Crescent Valley every year and spoke with Sanders on Tuesday off-days during his four seasons with the San Francisco 49ers.

So the star safety rang Sanders and told him the news, excitedly: He was going to sign with the Broncos.

“He thought Denver was a great fit for him and his family,” Sanders said, “and maybe ride out his career there, and raise his daughter.”

Another factor? Linebacker Dre Greenlaw, Hufanga’s teammate for four years with the 49ers — and locker-mate — was also bound for Denver.

“That was huge for him,” Sanders said. “That’s basically his best friend.”

This, as Sanders understood, was largely why Hufanga picked Denver over a slew of other suitors, the safety signing a three-year deal in a massive offseason upgrade to the Broncos’ secondary. There was buddy Greenlaw. There were good school systems. There was community. This was Hufanga at his core, now a 25-year-old man with a daughter, but still the same kid whose ear-to-ear grin lives in the hearts of his former teachers at Crescent Valley.

“The person inside — underneath the uniform and all that, he hasn’t changed,” said Crescent Valley math teacher Ron Howe, who similarly caught up with Hufanga this week. “And he’s got a heart for people.”

He’s bled Crescent Valley black, his story rooted in the dirt of Albany, Ore., growing up on his family’s farm across the Willamette River. He’s bled USC gold, becoming a headhunter in Southern California. He’s bled 49ers red, where high school coaches in the Bay Area can tell you stories of one of the best safeties in the NFL showing up unannounced to watch Friday night football, for sheer love of the game.

And Hufanga will bleed Bronco blue, those who know him profess, well beyond the sidelines at Empower Field.

“He’ll say, ‘I’ll go,’ whatever it is,” Sanders said, tossing out a hypothetical Broncos community event. “It could be a balloon-sculpting competition at the Boys and Girls Club of Denver, and he’ll show up. And he’ll try to win it.

“You think I’m joking,” Sanders chuckled. “But he will.”

•••

Ralen Goforth doesn’t remember who, exactly. But a few years back at USC, someone told him that then-teammate Hufanga grew up on a farm.

“Bro, what?” Goforth, then a linebacker at USC, responded. So he approached Hufanga to confirm. It took some back-and-forth. The conversation went, roughly, as follows:

So, chickens and all that stuff? 

Yeah. All that. 

Dang. 

“I don’t know too many Polynesians that grew up on farms, me personally,” Goforth, a native of Long Beach, Calif., told The Denver Post.

“So I’m looking at him,” Goforth continued, “and I was like, ‘Dude, you was in Oregon, on a farm.'”

Hufanga’s father, Tevita, had journeyed to the United States from Tonga, and he and Hufanga’s mother, Tanya, drilled discipline into their sons. On double days at Crescent Valley, Hufanga would ask Sanders when practice was over because he had to trek home and work. Hay needed to be baled. Gravel needed to be paved. Their goat Fiji needed to be fed.

One day in Hufanga’s freshman year, in a story he shared with former teacher Howe, Tevita was driving his son home from school when he asked him how he’d done on a math test.

“He did not do well on the test,” Howe put it.

Instead of pulling into the driveway, Tevita wheeled straight back behind the Hufanga home to their barn and told his son he had to clean it before he could eat dinner.

Cleaning it, of course, meant shoveling poop.

Sanders grew up the son of an electrician and bonded with Hufanga, a 5-foot-11 kid so muscled-up as a freshman that Sanders first thought he was a college safety while at a joint summer strength camp with Oregon State. Tevita drove his son every morning at 4:45 to a downtown gym to work out, and still Hufanga would hit morning weights at Crescent Valley, and hit conditioning, and his coaches would remind him that there was, in fact, such a thing as rest.

“It’s the mentality that, ‘nobody’s going to outwork me,’ nobody on the field, on either side,” Sanders described. “Whether it’s his teammates or the team we’re playing — that those kids did not do anything that he did growing up.”

That nature made Hufanga a top recruit in Oregon, an All-American at USC and an All-Pro safety in San Francisco. Former 49ers defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen told The Post he thought coaches were “going to love him” in Denver, citing Hufanga’s versatility and leadership in the secondary, traits universally praised for years.

“I’ve seen bro play, man,” Goforth said of Hufanga, rattling off a list of strengths. “I’ve seen bro roll down in the box, he’s a box player if he needs to be. He can be that outside ‘backer, nickel-type thing.

“And I’ve seen bro literally cover sideline-to-sideline, picking stuff off.”

•••

In 2016, Crescent Valley athletic director Craig Ellingson was standing on the sidelines at a game with ex-Oregon State head coach Gary Andersen, who’d stopped by to scout Hufanga.

“I haven’t seen him play,” Andersen told Ellingson. “Does he play hard?”

At that moment — that divine moment, as Ellingson remembers it — Hufanga screamed in from the secondary and blew up an opposing running back on a sweep. They collapsed in a pile to the sidelines, landing snug at the feet of Ellingson and Andersen.

“Well,” Andersen remarked, “that just answered my question.”

Few have questioned Hufanga’s effort since. That’s never been the problem. Quite the opposite. He is a 6-foot, 200-pound rock from a slingshot, flinging himself between painted lines, smacking off tree-trunk torsos. A dead-leg thigh bruise sidelined him for a stretch his sophomore year at Crescent Valley after he had a free lane on one touchdown run but decided to bowl over a defender instead. Persistent shoulder and collarbone injuries marred his early years at USC, a safety “going for the knockout” on every hit, as Sanders described.

Once, in a USC linebacker-specific film session that Hufanga wasn’t even a part of, Goforth and company ran through a play where the safety torpedoed another ball carrier.

“My coach at the time, he made a joke just saying, like, ‘Look at Talanoa, man,'” Goforth recalled. “‘This is why, man — those shoulders.'”

Back at Crescent Valley, Sanders remembered, coaches would plead with Hufanga until their faces went blue to just wrap up and protect his body. Sanders had a conversation with Hufanga about it when he was at USC. They had another conversation about it when Hufanga was a rookie in San Francisco.

He’s learned from it, Sanders feels. But injury struggles — whether wear-and-tear or fluke — have temporarily derailed Hufanga’s young NFL career. A torn ACL ended his 2023 season prematurely. Torn wrist ligaments scratched much of 2024.

The Broncos’ investment in him is undoubtedly a risk, their most expensive free-agent signing of a busy offseason, committing $45 million in total value across a three-year deal for a safety who’s played 17 combined games across the past two seasons. When active, he hasn’t quite looked the same as his All-Pro campaign in 2021, when he racked up four picks and nine pass deflections.

But those who’ve seen Hufanga weather the storm, from Crescent Valley to USC and the league, are confident he’ll bounce back.

“Knowing him personally — one thing I will say, going into that Denver building, he’s going to be highly motivated,” Goforth said. “He’s going to put his nose down and go to work.

“And he is going to be on a mission, to prove anybody who doubts him wrong, but to prove himself right,” Goforth continued, “that he still does this.”

•••

For years, upon his entry to the league, Hufanga would venture down to San Diego for spring offseason workouts with USC and NFL legend Troy Polumalu. They went off the grid. Social media was disavowed.

Twice, briefly, he was joined by former Crescent Valley teacher Howe, on his own surf trips down to Oceanside.

They never overlapped, much, in the athletic realm. Howe taught Hufanga 10th grade algebra. But they both grew up athletes and Christians, and long stayed in touch, Hufanga once going to watch one of Howe’s son’s YMCA basketball games in high school. Years later, they swam together in the Pacific Ocean down in Southern California and strummed acoustic guitars, a 57-year-old high school math teacher and an All-Pro NFL safety forming a sort of kinship.

“Sometimes I can’t believe that’s the same guy that I knew years and years ago, but at the same time it’s still the same Talanoa,” Howe reflected. “And I’m just so proud of the man. I get emotional.”

It was there, one San Diego hang a couple of years back, when Hufanga and Howe sat for a three-hour conversation on life itself. He’d learned, Hufanga explained to Howe, to stay present in each moment. It was the same philosophy he’d applied to rehabbing through some frustrating seasons, telling Howe his approach was to simply take each day as it came.

“I don’t think he’s mentally anywhere but where he’s always been, and that’s doing his best every day,” Howe said. “He doesn’t get anxious about the future.”

At the same time, too, this is the same man who grew up on pastoral Oregon farmland, pushing himself on pre-dawn lifts, who nearly hyperventilated in the shower before one freshman-year playoff game at Crescent Valley.

In 2023, a few weeks before Hufanga tore his ACL, Howe and his family went to a 49ers-Bengals game to see him play. After a 31-17 loss, Hufanga walked up to Howe and gave him a hug.

“I just gotta play better,” Hufanga told his old teacher, as Howe remembered.

“You had nine tackles,” Howe told him. (He actually had 10)

“I just gotta play better,” Hufanga repeated.

He, still, is just 25, with all of 49 NFL games under his belt. The innate heat-seeking system is still there. And behind the scenes of a frustrating 49ers season in 2024, both Hufanga and Greenlaw — who played just two games recovering from a torn Achilles tendon the previous year — “attacked” their rehab in 2024, former defensive coordinator Sorensen said.

“They’re worth every penny,” Sorensen told The Post.

“If anyone questions it, they’re wrong.”

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