04/25/24
August 29, 2015
UNT Has Put 32 Football Walk-Ons On Scholarship in 4 Seasons: Since Dan McCarney became the head coach of the North Texas Mean Green in 2011, my alma mater has done one thing more often than any other in the FBS: Give scholarships to walk-ons. USA Today reports, "Along a wall inside the football program's offices is a display of 32 faces and names, all former or current North Texas players of varying success, from backup defensive backs through starting offensive linemen, each with a shared starting point: As a former walk-on who 'through effort and dedication,' the display reads, was awarded a scholarship." Those players have contributed 146 starts, nearly 400 tackles, 4,500 yards of total offense and 32 touchdowns.
Great story. McCarney is the Anti-Saban.
posted by beaverboard at 10:33 AM on August 30, 2015
This is cool -- I didn't realize UNT was doing so much more of this than other programs -- but I dispute the writer's claim that "North Texas, in a general sense, doesn't need a walk-on program to be successful -- not when the school sits just outside of the Dallas area, with its dozens of successful high school programs, and not with inroads throughout Texas, perhaps the nation's most fertile recruiting landscape."
UNT definitely needs this, because it doesn't recruit well historically against all the other Texas FBS schools. McCarney is doing the same thing he did at Iowa State and looking for ways an underdog can succeed and grow.