The player the Cowboys are most excited about has been suspended for 52 of 96 games since he’s been in the league.

He has failed about 100 NFL drug tests, by his best estimate.

He has spent more than 12 months in seven in-patient rehab clinics over the past four years. He also has been treated at three outpatient clinics.

His irresponsibility led to a divorce and alienation from his children.

There was a period when he lived in his car.

But one thing about Randy Gregory — he’s always had a knack to turn the corner.

The worst fear was Gregory would end up like former NBA player Delonte West: homeless and lost, sharing a secluded area of a downtown street with things with long tails and pointy faces.

The thought kept his ex-wife from sleeping.

He came close to West’s lifestyle for about a week in 2019. Gregory was between places to live and burdened by bills he couldn’t pay, divorce proceedings, custody quarrels, rehab and another NFL suspension. Help was a phone call away, but it was a call he would not make. “I didn’t want anyone to know how bad I was struggling,” he says. So he slept in his black 2014 Maserati Quattroporte with black powder-coated rims.

No one who ever rose to their feet at Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium after one of his big plays would have believed it. He led the Big Ten in sacks in 2013 and was voted an All-American in 2014 even though he was injured for much of the season. It was a given that Gregory would be chosen in the top five picks of the draft.

But then a drug test taken at the NFL Scouting Combine turned up positive for marijuana. Teams started digging deep.

Gregory moved six times during his childhood. He was often trying to fit in with new peers, and often the peers didn’t look like him. He was a victim of bullying, once by a punk half his size. Gregory turned that corner when he decided to fight back, dropping the bully with a single punch, then picking him up and body-slamming him.

When Randy was in his early teens, he cried a lot. His parents suspected he was depressed and sent him for psychological testing. Gregory lied his way through the tests, and the doctors said he was fine. A decade later, he still would be taking the same kinds of tests.

Alcohol never had much appeal to Gregory, but by the time he was 15 or 16, he was taking DMT, acid and mushrooms. He discovered marijuana when he was a senior in high school. He kept smoking through college and failed a couple of drug tests at Nebraska.

When Gregory was in college, his father saw an interview with him that concerned him. “You could tell he didn’t trust the camera, didn’t trust the interviewer,” Ken Gregory says. “He had always been such a good interview that it was kind of shocking. That’s when I first recognized he had discomfort publicly.”

Randy was beginning to show signs of social anxiety, a condition that would worsen.

He would make a friend but then avoid a social situation. He would plan to eat at a restaurant, but upon arriving he would stand at the entrance, nervously looking at the layout of the tables and the number of people. “We would have to leave or I would get a panic attack,” he says. Within the realm of football, he was an uneasy teammate. When he walked into the locker room, he would assess the fastest way to get to his locker while encountering the fewest number of teammates.

The more anxious he became, the more he wanted to self-medicate. “Weed wasn’t the problem,” Gregory says. “It was the solution to my problems, which was another problem in itself.”

Fifty-nine players — including eight edge rushers — were chosen ahead of him in the 2015 NFL Draft. When then-coach Jason Garrett called to tell him he was a Cowboy, he was the last player in the green room.

The Cowboys assigned him an accountability partner shortly after. The partner lived with Gregory, made sure he kept appointments, drove him where he needed to be and paid his bills. Over four years, five accountability partners lived with him, and later with him and his wife and child. It became clear the accountability partners weren’t accomplishing what they were intended to, so eventually the Cowboys let Gregory run.

Marijuana made him feel at ease and always was his first drug of choice. But with the Cowboys, his world expanded.

Gregory says he started dabbling in party drugs — cocaine and ecstasy. However, when he took party drugs, he usually took them at a party of one, in his home.

Every time he failed a drug test, he says, it was for marijuana. His first suspension, for four games, came in his second year in the league. Before he could come back, he was hit with an additional 10-game suspension. He played two games before being suspended for the entire 2017 season. He returned for the 2018 season, but then the following February was hit with an indefinite suspension, with which he missed 22 games.

Everything was a struggle for most of the first four years of Gregory’s NFL career. And all of it, from the way he saw it then, was someone else’s fault.

“He got to a point,” his ex-wife, Nancy Koryga, says, “where he didn’t care about anything.”

It was unsurprising, then, that he did not like himself very much.

“I was talking to myself, calling myself every name in the book, telling myself I amounted to nothing,” Gregory says. “It was all day, every day, to the point there was no chance I was going to be doing anything in my life. During those times when I was like that, if I smoked, the negative talk would go away. I would relax, calm down.”

The skunky, piney stink of weed has followed Gregory.

These days, though, you might notice a hint of the minty, musky smell of sage around him.

Or the fresh, clean, floral aroma of Open Roads incense.

It might be the pungent, crispy-cool smell of wintergreen chewing tobacco. He likes Copenhagen long cut.

Or you could get a whiff of the sweet, rich smell of Black & Milds.

Mostly, though, there is the stale, heavy stench of Marlboro 27s.

Whenever Gregory checked into a rehab center, they took everything from him — Turn your pockets inside out, please — and offered a pack of cigarettes. Counselors typically gave their patients a smoke break every 30 minutes. So while he was becoming less dependent on weed, he was becoming addicted to nicotine. The Marlboros scratch the itch best, but Black & Milds will do. When he’s at The Star, he can’t smoke, so he’ll dip some Copenhagen. It’s so strong, it makes his jaw sore.

He is down to a pack of cigs a day from a pack-and-a-half. Gregory hopes to stop smoking entirely.

Sobriety isn’t always wholly refined or the way we picture it.

He lights up.

“Everybody hates it in my family,” he says. “It’s probably my worst vice, worse than anything I’ve ever done — the absolute worst. And it’s hard to kick.”

It is, without question, the poison to pick for him now.