Wisconsin quarterback Russell Wilson may be the best quarterback the school has ever seen, and who might lead the football program to its first national title, hadn't even stepped on campus until July. Ben Cohen has his story on Lunch Break.
Wisconsin quarterback Russell Wilson has led the No. 4 Badgers to a 6-0 record coming into this weekend's showdown with No. 15 Michigan State. He has the country's best quarterback rating. He's a serious Heisman Trophy contender (Wisconsin's athletic department calls his campaign "RussellManiaXVI" after his jersey number). Last weekend, he even caught a touchdown pass.
As any seasoned college-football fan knows, the ability to enjoy this sport often requires the parallel ability to endure the occasional glimpse at its unsavory side—the predatory recruiting, the salaries of the coaches, the occasional NCAA rules violation. There are always inconvenient details to brush aside, judgments to suspend and ethical gymnastics to perform.
But this season, Wisconsin fans are going through something entirely new. Wilson, who may be the best quarterback the school has ever seen, and who might lead the football program to its first national title, hadn't played for Wisconsin before this year. In fact, he hadn't even stepped on campus until July.
To make the situation even more unusual, Wilson isn't pursuing an undergraduate degree at Wisconsin: He already has one from North Carolina State, the school whose football team he quarterbacked last season. Wilson is, for all intents and purposes, a hired gun—a college-football free agent.
"When we're looking back on it, it might be kind of weird to think about how this all happened in one season," said Adam Hoge, the editor of Bucky's 5th Quarter, a Wisconsin sports blog. "But the way he's fit in, it doesn't seem like he's an outsider at all."
Wilson owes his Wisconsin adventure to a series of NCAA bylaws, none of them especially controversial, that have conspired to produce a rare outcome. Under eligibility rules, an athlete can play a sport for four seasons. But if an athlete is held out as a freshman, or is injured, or leaves the team for a season, that athlete's eligibility doesn't expire—even if the athlete keeps taking classes. Since Wilson "redshirted" as a freshman at N.C. State, he had a year of eligibility left after four years.
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When he arrived on campus, Wilson was such an instant hit with his teammates that they elected him a co-captain.
What makes Wilson's case unusual is that he's not just good at football. In 2010, the Colorado Rockies picked Wilson, a second-baseman, in the fourth round of baseball's amateur draft. Caught between two sports, with one year of football eligibility left, Wilson faced an ultimatum from his coaches at N.C. State, who wanted him to commit to playing football.
Wilson said no, so the Wolfpack released him from his scholarship. This spring, after playing short-season minor-league ball in 2010, he went to play for the Class-A minor-league Asheville Tourists. While there, he hit a mediocre .228. (He hit .230 the year before.)
Because he had already graduated from N.C. State, Wilson was freed from the usual NCAA transfer rules, which ordinarily force a player to sit out a season after switching schools. So as he spent the summer playing baseball, Wilson found himself in an enviable position: He was an experienced college quarterback who was free to play, for one year only, at any school that would have him.
Naturally, Wilson said, he wanted to join a title contender, which by all rights Wisconsin was. He said some 30 schools contacted him and that his decision came down to the Badgers and another top team that needed a quarterback: defending national-champion Auburn. Scott Kennedy, Scout.com's recruiting director, said Wisconsin's quarterback vacancy made it the perfect example of what he calls a "doughnut" team. "They've got all this talent and a big hole in the middle," he said.
After six games, Wilson has thrown for 14 touchdowns, rushed for two and caught one as Wisconsin has averaged a 40-point margin of victory. "I thought he would start, and I thought they would win, but I didn't think the transition would be this smooth," said former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach.
Since 1996, 10 quarterbacks have used their last season of eligibility at another Football Bowl Subdivision school, according to Stats LLC. Wilson has put up better numbers than almost all of them—and he's the only one who has put a team within striking distance of a national championship.
"Was it everything I expected? Definitely everything I expected—and maybe a little more," Wilson said of his time so far at Wisconsin.
This arrangement comes on the heels of a number of high-profile cases that have stretched the boundaries of what defines a college-football player. Last year, quarterback Cam Newton, who had transferred twice, and whose recruitment had been the subject of an NCAA investigation, led Auburn to the title (the NCAA recently closed the investigation, saying it found no new violations). This season, the highest-scoring team after Wisconsin—Oklahoma State—is led by a 28-year-old quarterback named Brandon Weeden, who took a detour from college to try to make it with the New York Yankees.
Wilson's unusual case has made him vulnerable to message-board critics, who see him as a mercenary. "You're going to ruffle some feathers when you bring in a guy and hand him a starting job," Kennedy said. "I can't think of a guy with one year left that was basically a free agent that had this kind of résumé and pedigree to come in and do something like this."
No matter what you think of his circumstances, Wilson is, by all accounts, easy to like. When he was recruited in high school, many colleges projected the 5-foot-11 Wilson as a cornerback. But in his time at N.C. State, he emerged as one of the Atlantic Coast Conference's top signal callers. He was named first-team all-conference in 2008.
Before pursuing him, Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema did his due diligence—from sifting through minor-league box scores to dispatching offensive coordinator Paul Chryst to Richmond, Va., to learn about Wilson's time at Collegiate School. There they discovered that Wilson had been elected class president and was so committed to football that he never lost at team sprints.
Charlie McFall, Wilson's high-school coach, said Wisconsin was the only team to gather so much information.
"They didn't want to leave any rocks unturned," he said. "They knew it was such a critical component of their team, but also what it could do to their chemistry."
When he arrived on campus, Wilson was such an instant hit with his teammates that they elected him a co-captain. "It does have this weird feel-good quality," Leach said. "You've got something shaping up in a Frank Capra movie sort of way."
It's unlikely a case like this will happen again. In 2007, the NCAA overturned the rule that allowed graduates with remaining eligibility to transfer to any school and play immediately. The only reason Wilson was able to circumvent the rule is that he obtained a waiver that is usually granted only to student athletes who enroll in a master's program that isn't available at their original institution. (At Wisconsin, Wilson is taking classes in educational leadership.)
That repeal didn't go far enough for the Southeastern Conference, which recently passed a bylaw prohibiting players from transferring into the league with just one year of eligibility. It went into effect Oct. 1 and would not have affected Wilson had he enrolled at Auburn, the only other school he visited.
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