Walk-On This Way: What makes a walk-on?
September 28, 2016 | Football, General News
Excerpt from the book on the ongoing legacy of Wisconsin football walk-on tradition
The following is excerpted from the new book "Walk-On This Way: The On-Going Legacy of the Wisconsin Football Walk-On Tradition" from KCI Sports Publishing. The 256-page hardcover book highlights the contributions made by the "undersized, underdeveloped and under recruited" players that have played a vital role in the success of Wisconsin football since 1990, featuring first-person accounts and more than 100 interviews with former players and coaches.
Walk-On This Way - Available for Pre-Order
BY JOEL NELLIS & JAKE KOCOROWSKI
Walk-On This Way
Walk-ons aren't uncommon in college football.
Coaching staffs have to replenish talent each season with players who would "walk on" to the program and pay for their own college education while balancing both athletics and academics.
What's not common is the level of impact and success walk-ons have had on Wisconsin football since Barry Alvarez arrived in Madison over 26 years ago.
Upon his arrival from Notre Dame in 1990, Alvarez set about to drastically change the fortunes of Wisconsin football for years to come.
First, he built a wall around Wisconsin's borders to keep those talented in-state recruits from leaving for Iowa, Michigan and Notre Dame. Second, he implemented a physical, run-oriented scheme that would become the calling card of UW's offense. Lastly, he would mimic what his former head coach, Bob Devaney, mastered in his time in Lincoln with Nebraska's walk-on program.
Those tenets would be sown into the fabric of Wisconsin football. A program mired in abysmal futility during the late 1980s, compiling a 6-27 record under Don Morton from 1987-89, would be resurrected and produce a conference and Rose Bowl Championship team in just four seasons.
"They are my erasers. That's how I labeled them," acknowledged Alvarez, referring to UW's walk-ons. "They were the difference maker. They were the edge in our program. Every coach looks for an edge. I don't care what it is, there are a lot of different things. If you grow up in Florida or Georgia, your edge is your skill players. At Wisconsin, we're going to have big guys and we're going to have additional guys through our walk-on program. They're the edge that we had. They gave us the edge when you had limited scholarships. We gave respect to the walk-ons knowing that we would get a handful or more every year that would end up playing for us."
Sometimes those highly-regarded recruits a program signs may not pan out. There could be a variety of reasons, from unfortunate injuries throughout their career to discipline issues. Some of the scholarship players just don't live up to the hype they gain in their prep careers. Wisconsin's successfully recruited the walk-ons to not just be scout team bodies or special teams players. They've become those "erasers" as Alvarez mentioned, performing when called upon, but also consistently playing their way into contributing roles on both sides of the ball.
Simply put, walk-ons – those described as "undersized, underdeveloped and under-recruited" by former head coach Bret Bielema – have made a vital and significant impact on the success of the Wisconsin program in the past 25 seasons.
"I say year in and year out, consistently, Wisconsin seems to me to have – certainly in the Big Ten – the best walk-on tradition," said Big Ten Network studio host Dave Revsine. "While I'm more familiar with the Big Ten in the last decade or so than I am with any other conference because I follow it most closely, it seems to me that in terms of getting consistent production from walk-ons in key positions, I can't imagine there's anyone that's getting more out of their walk- on program than Wisconsin."
From a national perspective, there's always the great walk-on stories you see on ESPN College Gameday of the one player who overcame the odds to make an impact on his team, the one player who personified perseverance that gets that long-awaited scholarship.
"Often times these are not the kids who were anointed in high school as the next best thing so they had to fight and scrap," Sports Illustrated's Lindsay Schnell said, who extensively writes about walk-ons at a national level.
Only a few programs have cultivated a culture of walk-ons contributing each season. Most schools will add a handful of walk-ons for depth during training camp so they have bodies to scrimmage the starters. Others may rely upon them in times of sanctions against their respective programs, but few Division I teams truly embrace the tradition of walk-ons.
"Kansas State, Nebraska, and Wisconsin are the three that come to my mind that it is celebrated," Schnell elaborated. "It is sort of a badge of honor if you're a walk-on, especially if you're a walk-on who earns a scholarship. And I think because it has been proven that it works at those places, that they will give you a fair shot, it's not as scary to walk on there."
Wisconsin natives Joe Panos, Sam Veit, Chris Hein and Chad Cascadden were walk-ons who contributed heavily to the Badgers' first Rose Bowl championship team during the 1993 season. Their success served as the blueprint for walk-on starters Jason Doering, Donnel Thompson, Bob Adamov and Mark Tauscher during the 1998 and 1999 seasons when UW won back-to-back Rose Bowls.
Dozens of others, including Jim Leonhard and Chris Maragos, have continued that walk-on success from the early- to-late 2000s. As of summer 2016, 90 walk-ons have earned scholarships since 1990 when Alvarez took over the football program. Each of the six Rose Bowl teams the Badgers have fielded since 1993 had at least two or more starters walk on to the program. Some of those years had at least four walk-ons start in certain stretches of the season. In all but one season a walk-on was named as a team captain.
