While top recruits celebrate on National Signing Day, preferred walk-ons gamble on their football futures

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/highschools/while-top-recruits-celebrate-on-national-signing-day-preferred-walk-ons-gamble-on-their-football-futures/2016/02/02/211661da-c9b3-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html

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An exhausted Andrew Vastardis walked into his Ashburn home one recent evening following basketball practice at Stone Bridge High and found both of his parents waiting for him. The Bulldogs senior had received a phone message. It came from some guy named Jim Harbaugh.

Vastardis’s eyes immediately lit up at the thought of hearing from the football coach at Michigan. This was the same school he had loved since age 6, home of the same maize and blue colors adorning the Fathead cutout plastered on his bedroom wall.

As the All-Met offensive lineman’s parents ran through Harbaugh’s spiel — how Vastardis had impressed Wolverines assistant Tim Drevno at a camp last summer and their vision of him competing for the center spot that would be up for grabs in the fall — they stressed that there was a catch. To pursue his dream in Ann Arbor, Vastardis would need to agree to be a preferred walk-on.

That meant giving up the full athletic scholarship he had lined up in July when he committed to Old Dominion, leaving his home state to attend college 500 miles away on his parents’ own dime and entering a situation with few guarantees. The route is one that an increasing number of high school football players are choosing — an arduous undertaking that turns the tables on Wednesday’s increasingly ballyhooed National Signing Day by requiring the prospects to take a chance on both the college and themselves.

“Somebody once told me to ‘bet on myself,’ and that’s what I’ve been figuring in my head this whole time. I know that I will work as hard as anyone out there,” Vastardis said. “There’s always a risk. The level of competition at Michigan is much higher than ODU. But when they called, and I heard the opportunities they were offering me, I had to take it.”

For preferred walk-ons, certain potential benefits exist for the player and the school. Recruits like Vastardis are given a chance to play and later earn a scholarship at their dream school. The Rudy-like experience begins on the practice squad and could culminate in a success story similar to those of NFL stars J.J. Watt and Clay Matthews, who initially enrolled as preferred walk-ons at Wisconsin and Southern California, respectively.

For college coaches, preferred walk-ons serve as a loophole to go beyond their limit of 85 scholarship players and bring in a potential late bloomer with little to no strings attached. Though the NCAA does not compile specific data on walk-ons, with 20 walk-on spots allocated to compete in preseason camp and many in-season rosters numbering just north of 100 players, there are likely well over 1,000 walk-ons across the 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools.

“That’s what makes projecting all of this so difficult,” said Tom Luginbill, ESPN’s national director of recruiting. “Nobody has a crystal ball. And unlike the NFL draft, when you’re dealing with 22-year-olds and a multitude of definitive variables, at this level, you’re dealing with kids with a ton of unknown variables.”

The desire to prove the prognosticators wrong is what drove the college decision of former Patriot All-Met Nick Mathews. Despite setting a Virginia High School League record with 102 catches as a senior in 2014, the lone Division I offer drawn by the 5-foot-10 wide receiver came a week before Signing Day — a partial scholarship from St. Francis (Pa.) of the Football Championship Subdivision. Convinced that he could compete with top-level talent, Mathews elected to accept a preferred walk-on spot at Marshall and pay his own way for at least the first year.

During his first week at the West Virginia school, Mathews “felt like a ghost.” Aside from the assistant coach who recruited him, no one knew his name. But by the end of camp, after Mathews consistently finished atop the production chart for fewest dropped balls and missed assignments, the mechanically sound freshman was named the backup slot receiver in Marshall’s up-tempo, pass-oriented offense.

“When you first get there no one will know you, and when you get fewer reps no one cares. But you can’t get down or doubt yourself,” said Mathews, who is now being considered for a scholarship after finishing his freshman season with four catches for 29 yards in nine games. “I didn’t make any huge, exciting catches, but they don’t care if you’re a walk-on or scholarship player; if you’re making plays, they are going to keep you in there.”

[Rashan Gary, Derrick Brown among top uncommitted national prospects]

Like most athletes in his position, Mathews often heard the mantra that the only difference between a walk-on and scholarship player is that one pays his own way. That gap, though subtle on the field, resonates in different ways for different players, many of whom cannot financially afford to take the risk of passing up a scholarship from a smaller school.

“That, in my opinion, is the most significant factor in the overall decision-making process, as well it should be,” Luginbill said. “There are going to be certain guys that don’t have any hardship in that regard and it’s just about, ‘I want to be a Division I player.’ Sometimes, that type of drive is enough to earn a scholarship.”

The reality, however, is that it often is not enough. While preferred walk-ons are generally first in line when a spot opens up on the depth chart, the NCAA does not allow schools to provide written promises of scholarships to walk-ons.

Good Counsel quarterback Andres Castillo admitted to wrestling with some of those odds, especially after being demoted to a part-time starter two games into his senior season with the Falcons this past fall. With little film to draw from as a senior, offers were slow to come. Two weeks before signing day, only Delaware, James Madison and Richmond had officially extended preferred walk-on opportunities.

But thanks to the footage from his previous two seasons that displayed Castillo’s speed and strong arm, as well as the encouragement and network of his father, Juan, who is a Baltimore Ravens assistant, the dual-threat quarterback’s perseverance led to a preferred walk-on spot at Wisconsin, which he accepted last week.

While Castillo does not skirt around the fact that chances are slim for him to follow in the large footsteps of Watt as a Badgers walk-on, he does detect one similarity between him and the Houston Texans star — opportunity.

“I knew I had worked far too hard to keep doubting myself,” Castillo said. “That chance, no matter how short or small, is going to come; and when it does, you have to take full advantage of it.”