What Is a Walk-On in College Football? Preferred vs Tryout
What a walk-on is in college football: preferred and tryout walk-ons under NCAA rules, how a scholarship is earned, and what the 105-player cap changed.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished College Football25 min read
- FBS roster cap
- 105 players
- Old FBS scholarship limit
- 85
- Burlsworth Trophy first awarded
- 2010
- First walk-on to win the Heisman
- Baker Mayfield, 2017
One second remained in the national championship game on January 9, 2017, when Deshaun Watson threw two yards to Hunter Renfrow in Tampa. Clemson 35, Alabama 31. The receiver who caught it had arrived on campus in 2014 with no scholarship and no guarantee of ever playing. He was a walk-on.
In college football, a walk-on is a player on the roster who does not receive an athletic scholarship. That is the whole definition under NCAA rules. He practices, lifts, attends meetings and can play in games like anyone else on the team, but he pays for school himself or through aid that has nothing to do with football. There are two kinds. A preferred walk-on has been recruited and promised a roster place without money. A tryout walk-on shows up as an enrolled student and has to win a place in an open audition. In the Football Bowl Subdivision, the 105-player roster cap that took effect in 2025 has made both kinds scarcer than they have been in fifty years.
What a walk-on is in college football, in the rulebook's terms
The NCAA Division I Manual does not spend much time on the word. For decades its concern was the opposite category, the "counter": a player whose athletic aid counted against the team's limit, which in FBS football was 85. Everyone else on the roster was a non-counter. Walk-on is the locker-room name for that second group.
Being off athletic scholarship does not mean being off financial aid. A walk-on may hold an academic merit award, a federal Pell Grant, a state program such as Georgia's HOPE Scholarship, or loans, on the same terms as any other student. The old rules watched this closely where a recruited player was involved, because a school that handed a recruit a generous "academic" package could be hiding a football scholarship. In broad terms, aid that any student could have won on the same criteria was safe, and aid steered to an athlete was not.
On every other page of the manual the walk-on is simply a student-athlete. He has to be certified as an amateur and academically eligible. He has to carry a full-time course load and make progress toward a degree. He is subject to the same drug testing, the same limits on weekly practice hours, and the same eligibility clock, which our guide to college football redshirt rules explains.
What he does not get
A scholarship is tuition, fees, room, board and books, plus a cost-of-attendance stipend at schools that pay one. The walk-on gets none of that from the athletic department. At a public university the gap for an in-state student is large; for an out-of-state student or at a private school it can run past the price of a house over four years. That arithmetic explains why so many walk-ons are local. A linebacker from 40 miles away pays resident tuition and may live at home. The same offer to a player from three states over is a much harder family conversation.
What he does get is access. The weight room, the athletic trainers, the academic center, the tutors, the position coach's attention in drills, and a jersey. For some players that is worth more than a full scholarship one level down, and for others it is not. Both decisions are defensible.
Preferred walk-on meaning: a roster place with no money attached
A preferred walk-on, usually shortened to PWO, has been recruited. A coach watched his film, perhaps saw him at a summer camp, and decided he was good enough to have in the program but not good enough, or not needed enough, to spend a scholarship on. The offer is a guaranteed place on the roster from the first day of preseason camp.
The difference from a scholarship offer is the paper. A scholarship recruit signs a written athletic aid agreement with the school, the document that carries the commitment now that the National Letter of Intent has been retired. A preferred walk-on signs nothing binding. High schools still hold ceremonies for them, with the hat and the table and the photographs, and the player may well sign a sheet of paper for the cameras. It commits nobody to anything. The school can change its mind, and so can he.
Certain positions live in this category. Kickers, punters and long snappers have often been preferred walk-ons, because a staff with 85 scholarships was reluctant to spend three or four of them on specialists and knew that good ones would come anyway for the chance to win the job. Fullbacks, undersized linebackers and late-developing linemen fill out the rest.
| Scholarship player | Preferred walk-on | Tryout walk-on | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recruited by the staff | Yes | Yes | No |
| Athletic aid | Tuition, fees, room, board, books | None | None |
| Roster place guaranteed on arrival | Yes | Yes, by the coach's word | No |
| Written agreement with the school | Athletic aid agreement | None that binds | None |
| Reports for preseason camp | Yes | Usually | After making the team |
| Can later be put on scholarship | Already is | Yes | Yes |
What the offer is really worth
A PWO offer from a power-conference program is often weighed against a scholarship from a smaller school, and recruits tend to hear the first as a compliment and the second as a consolation. That is backwards about as often as it is right. The honest questions to put to the coach making the offer are specific ones. How many walk-ons has this staff put on scholarship in the last three years? How many at this position? Will the player be in camp in August or told to join when classes start? A staff that answers those plainly is telling a recruit something. So is one that does not.
How coaches sort recruits into scholarship offers and walk-on offers in the first place is tied to the evaluation services, covered in our guide to what recruiting stars measure.
How to walk on to a college football team through an open tryout
The tryout walk-on is the one the movies are about, and he is the rarer of the two. He was not recruited. He is a student at the university who believes he can play.
Nobody walks in off the quad and runs a 40-yard dash that afternoon. The clearances come first, and they take weeks.
- Enroll full timeOnly a full-time student at the university can try out. Admission is on the school's ordinary terms, with no help from the football office.
- Eligibility certificationA freshman must be cleared by the NCAA Eligibility Center on academics and amateur status. A transfer needs his previous college record reviewed.
- Medical clearanceA physical examination within the previous six months, confirmation of sickle cell trait status, and proof of insurance are standard before any athletic activity.
- Compliance paperworkThe athletic compliance office collects the consent forms every Division I athlete signs, including the drug-testing consent.
- The tryoutA session without pads: timed sprints, agility drills and position work in front of the staff. It often lasts under two hours.
- The callA few players are invited to join practice. Many tryouts end with one or two names, and some with none.
The usual sequence at an NCAA Division I program. Dates, drills and the number of places differ by school and by year, and some programs hold no tryout at all.
The medical step is not a formality. NCAA rules require a recent physical before a student takes part in any practice or tryout, and Division I has required confirmation of sickle cell trait status for more than a decade, following deaths during conditioning workouts.
How few make it is hard to state as a number, because no body publishes one and the figure swings from campus to campus. The pattern is consistent, though. A tryout at a major program might draw several dozen students and produce a handful of invitations. What staffs look for is narrow: a body that can survive scout-team work against scholarship linemen, a position where the depth chart is thin, or a specialist's skill that shows up on a stopwatch. A former high school all-conference receiver who runs an ordinary time is competing with a roster full of them.
Timing matters as well. Tryouts are commonly held early in the fall semester or in the winter before spring practice, and a student who misses the notice from the football office usually waits months for the next one. Under the roster cap described below, some FBS programs have less reason to hold a tryout at all.
Walk-on vs scholarship player: scout team, special teams and the travel squad
Tuesday practice, the heaviest of the week. The first-team defense needs to see the opponent's offense at speed, and somebody has to be that offense. This is the scout team, and it is staffed heavily by walk-ons and first-year players. The job is to give the starters an honest look, which means running another team's plays at full effort and absorbing the collisions that come with it.
The second route to the field is special teams. Coverage units need players who run fast in a straight line and tackle, and a coach would often prefer not to risk a starting safety on a kickoff. A walk-on who makes two tackles inside the 20 gets noticed in Sunday's film session. Clay Matthews III built his reputation at Southern California that way before he ever started at linebacker.
On the field, the rulebook treats the two groups identically. A walk-on can start, can be elected captain, and can be named All-American. The practical separations have been off the field, and they have narrowed.
The travel squad
Home games are easy: most programs dress nearly everyone. Road games are where a walk-on finds out where he stands. Conferences have long limited the size of the traveling party for league games, and for much of the 85-scholarship era the figure in several major conferences was roughly 70 players. With 85 on scholarship, that list left off some scholarship players too. A walk-on on the travel squad had earned it, usually by holding a place on two or three special teams units.
So the answer to whether walk-ons can travel is yes, if the coaches choose them. Nothing in NCAA rules ties travel to scholarship status.
Meals, and the rule that changed in 2014
The sharpest daily difference used to be food. NCAA rules treated the training-table meal as a benefit attached to a scholarship, so a walk-on could finish the same practice as his teammates and then be unable to follow them into the dining hall without paying. Programs worked around it where they legally could. It remained a small humiliation repeated every day.
That ended in 2014. In April of that year, after Connecticut basketball player Shabazz Napier told reporters during the Final Four that he sometimes went to bed hungry, the Division I Legislative Council approved unlimited meals and snacks for all athletes, walk-ons included, effective that August. It is the single rule change that did most to make a walk-on's day resemble a scholarship player's.
Other gaps remain. A walk-on pays for his own summer classes and housing unless other aid covers them, receives no cost-of-attendance stipend, and has no multi-year guarantee of anything. Whether he shares in the newer forms of athlete income is a school-by-school matter, and the general rules are set out in our explainer on NIL deals and revenue sharing.
Do walk-ons get scholarships? How a place opens up
Under the 85 limit the mathematics was simple and unforgiving. A scholarship became available when a scholarship player left: graduation, a transfer, an early move to the NFL, a career-ending injury that shifted the player to a medical exemption. If the departures between January and August outnumbered the incoming recruits, the head coach had scholarships left over, and they went to walk-ons.
They were not always permanent. A common arrangement was the one-year award, given in August and reviewed the following summer when a new recruiting class needed the room. A walk-on could be on scholarship as a junior and off it as a senior. Semester awards were common too, particularly for seniors: a scholarship opened by a December graduate could pay for a fifth-year walk-on's last spring on campus. Coaches rarely describe these arrangements in the announcement video, and families should ask.
One rule gave long-serving walk-ons a small edge. When the NCAA capped the number of new scholarship players a team could add each year, a walk-on who had been in the program for two years could be awarded aid without counting against that annual figure. He was, in the accounting, free. The history of that annual cap and the 85 limit itself is in our guide to college football scholarship limits.
The team-meeting video
The announcement has become its own small genre. A coach calls a team meeting on a pretext: a guest speaker, a rules quiz, a talk about parking. Somewhere in it a walk-on's name is read out, the room goes over in a pile of bodies, and a staffer with a camera has the footage online within the hour. The videos are sincere and they are also recruiting material. Both things are true. A program that can show three of them every August is telling the next preferred walk-on that the path exists.
What the videos do not show is the base rate. For each player mobbed by his teammates there are others on the same roster who paid their own way for four or five years and finished without athletic aid. Most walk-ons do. That has always been the bargain.
What the 105 roster cap changed
For half a century FBS football limited scholarships and left roster size alone. Programs carried 115, 120, sometimes far more; Nebraska, true to its history, listed well over 130. The difference between 85 and the full roster was the walk-on population, commonly 30 players or more per team.
The House v. NCAA settlement, given final approval on June 6, 2025, turned that upside down. Schools inside the settlement no longer face a scholarship limit in football. They face a roster limit of 105, and every one of those 105 places may carry a full scholarship if the school chooses to fund it.
The consequences for walk-ons run in two directions. A program that funds all 105 has no walk-ons at all, by definition, though some of the players now on scholarship are those who would once have walked on. A program that stays near 85 scholarships has about 20 non-scholarship places, down from 30 or more. Either way, the 106th through 125th players on the old roster have nowhere to go.
The players exempted when the cap arrived
The cap was nearly approved without any protection for players already on teams. In April 2025 Judge Claudia Wilken declined to sign off on the settlement as written, and the objection she pressed was precisely this one: current athletes were being cut to make room for a limit they had never agreed to.
The parties came back with a category called designated student-athletes. Players who were on a roster in 2024-25 and were removed, or would have been removed, because of the new limits do not count against the cap for the rest of their eligibility. The exemption travels with the player to any school. Recruits who had been promised a place for 2025-26 were covered too.
Read the terms carefully, though. The exemption lets a school keep such a player above 105. It does not make the school do so. Many of the walk-ons cut in the winter and spring of 2025 were not brought back, and the protection arrived after a number of them had already enrolled elsewhere.
Our view is that the cap ends the large walk-on program as a strategy without ending the walk-on. Twenty places is enough for specialists, a few local players and the occasional late bloomer. It is not enough for a second scout team.
Programs built on walk-ons: Nebraska, Wisconsin and the 12th Man
Nebraska made walk-ons into a system. The state has one major program, a small population and a great many high schools playing football in towns of a few hundred people. Under Tom Osborne, head coach from 1973 to 1997, the Cornhuskers invited those players by the dozen. As the NCAA cut scholarship numbers through the 1970s and after, Nebraska filled the difference with in-state players who would have paid to be there, and did. The practice field had enough bodies to run more repetitions than opponents could manage.
Some of them became very good. I.M. Hipp arrived from South Carolina without a scholarship and led the team in rushing in the late 1970s. The Makovicka brothers, Jeff and Joel, came from Brainard and played fullback on Osborne's championship teams of the 1990s. Andy Janovich, a walk-on fullback from Gretna, went on to an NFL career. The roster cap lands harder in Lincoln than anywhere else for that reason.
Wisconsin's linemen
Barry Alvarez played linebacker at Nebraska in the 1960s and took the idea with him to Madison in 1990. Wisconsin's version leaned on big in-state players the recruiting services had missed. Joe Panos transferred from Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater, walked on, and captained the team that won the Rose Bowl on January 1, 1994. Mark Tauscher walked on from Auburndale and spent more than a decade at tackle for the Green Bay Packers. Rick Wagner arrived as a walk-on tight end and left as an NFL tackle.
The list runs beyond the line. Jim Leonhard, a safety from Tony, Wisconsin, became an All-American and later the program's defensive coordinator. Joe Schobert walked on and was named the Big Ten's top linebacker in 2015. J.J. Watt is the best known of all, and his story is told below.
Texas A&M and the number 12
The 12th Man tradition is older than either. On January 2, 1922, Texas A&M played Centre College in the Dixie Classic in Dallas, and injuries thinned the Aggies' bench so badly that coach Dana X. Bible sent for E. King Gill, a former football player who was watching that day from the press box. Gill changed into an injured teammate's uniform and stood on the sideline for the rest of the game, ready. He never went in. A&M won, 22-14.
In 1983 coach Jackie Sherrill turned the legend into a roster. He held campus tryouts and formed a kickoff coverage unit made up of walk-on students, the 12th Man Kickoff Team. Later coaches reduced it to a single walk-on wearing No. 12 on special teams, a practice the program has kept. It sits alongside the customs gathered in our guide to college football traditions.
Famous college football walk-ons who made it
The list of walk-ons who reached the NFL is long. The six below are the ones a broadcast crew tends to mention, and each took a slightly different road.
| Player | Walked on at | What followed |
|---|---|---|
| Baker Mayfield | Texas Tech in 2013, then Oklahoma in 2014 | Heisman Trophy in 2017; first overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft |
| J.J. Watt | Wisconsin in 2008, after leaving Central Michigan | 11th overall pick in 2011; three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year |
| Clay Matthews III | Southern California in 2004 | 26th overall pick in 2009; Super Bowl XLV winner with Green Bay |
| Jordy Nelson | Kansas State in 2003 | Consensus All-American receiver in 2007; second-round pick in 2008 |
| Hunter Renfrow | Clemson in 2014 | Winning touchdown catch in the January 2017 national title game; fifth-round pick in 2019 |
| Stetson Bennett | Georgia in 2017 | Quarterback of the national champions in the 2021 and 2022 seasons |
Baker Mayfield is the only one who did it twice. He walked on at Texas Tech out of Lake Travis High School in Austin and, with the scholarship quarterback ahead of him injured, started the 2013 opener as a true freshman. He left after that season, walked on at Oklahoma, sat out 2014 under the transfer rules of the day, and won the starting job in 2015. Two years later he became the first player who began as a walk-on to win the Heisman Trophy. The process behind that award is described in our guide to how Heisman voting works. The Big 12 later rewrote its transfer rule for walk-ons, a change that carried his name informally around the league.
J.J. Watt gave up a scholarship to become one. He played tight end at Central Michigan in 2007, decided he was at the wrong school and the wrong position, and went home to Wisconsin. He walked on with the Badgers in 2008, delivered pizzas to help pay his way, moved to defensive end and was a first-round pick three years later.
Clay Matthews III had the family name, a father and an uncle with long NFL careers, and no offers of consequence. He walked on at USC, earned a scholarship partway through his career, and did not become a full-time starter until his final season.
Jordy Nelson walked on at Kansas State as a defensive back out of Riley County High School, a short drive from campus. He moved to receiver early in his college career. The switch is a reminder that walk-ons are often athletes whose position has not been found yet.
Stetson Bennett walked on at Georgia in 2017 and spent that season on the scout team, where one of his assignments was to imitate Mayfield before the Rose Bowl semifinal against Oklahoma. He left for Jones College in Mississippi to play, came back to Georgia on scholarship in 2019, and won two national titles.
None of these players was drafted because of where he started, and how professional teams treat such late developers is covered in how the NFL draft works.
The Burlsworth Trophy and the Arkansas lineman behind it
Brandon Burlsworth walked on at Arkansas in 1994 from Harrison, a town in the Ozarks. He was overweight for his frame and unremarkable on film, and he wore thick black-rimmed glasses that became the thing people recognized him by. He redshirted, reshaped himself in the weight room, earned a scholarship and then the starting job at right guard. By 1998 he was an All-American. He also completed a master's degree before his final college game.
The Indianapolis Colts selected him in the third round of the 1999 NFL Draft. Eleven days later, on April 28, 1999, he was killed in a car accident in Arkansas while driving home from a workout. He was 22.
The trophy that carries his name was first awarded in 2010. It goes each year to the most outstanding FBS player who began his career as a walk-on, and it is presented by the Brandon Burlsworth Foundation, the charity his family set up after his death. The definition is strict on one point: the player must have started without athletic aid. Earning a scholarship later, as nearly every winner has, does not disqualify him.
| Year | Winner | Position | School |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Sean Bedford | Center | Georgia Tech |
| 2011 | Austin Davis | Quarterback | Southern Miss |
| 2012 | Matt McGloin | Quarterback | Penn State |
| 2013 | Jared Abbrederis | Wide receiver | Wisconsin |
| 2014 | Justin Hardy | Wide receiver | East Carolina |
| 2015 | Baker Mayfield | Quarterback | Oklahoma |
| 2016 | Baker Mayfield | Quarterback | Oklahoma |
| 2017 | Luke Falk | Quarterback | Washington State |
| 2018 | Hunter Renfrow | Wide receiver | Clemson |
| 2019 | Kenny Willekes | Defensive end | Michigan State |
| 2020 | Jimmy Morrissey | Center | Pittsburgh |
| 2021 | Grant Morgan | Linebacker | Arkansas |
| 2022 | Stetson Bennett | Quarterback | Georgia |
| 2023 | Cody Schrader | Running back | Missouri |
| 2024 | Bryce Boettcher | Linebacker | Oregon |
Mayfield remained the only two-time winner through the 2024 award; the list grows by one name every December. Quarterbacks have taken it more often than any other position, which says less about walk-on quarterbacks than about how awards are voted: the position with the statistics gets the attention.
- Quarterback40.0%
- Wide receiver20.0%
- Center13.3%
- Linebacker13.3%
- Other13.3%
Fifteen awards across fifteen seasons. Baker Mayfield's two wins are counted as two quarterback awards. Other covers one defensive end and one running back.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Quarterback | 6 |
| Wide receiver | 3 |
| Center | 2 |
| Linebacker | 2 |
| Other | 2 |
Blueshirts and other ways schools used walk-on status
Because a walk-on did not count against the scholarship limit, the status had value to the school as an accounting entry, and coaches found uses for it.
The best known was the blueshirt. NCAA rules defined a recruited player by a list of specific contacts, among them an official paid visit and an in-person meeting at his home. A player who had none of those was, on paper, unrecruited. He could enroll as a walk-on, report to practice, and be placed on scholarship shortly afterward, at which point the award was charged against the following year's allotment of new scholarships and not the current one. A staff that had already signed its full class could add two or three more players this way.
A related practice ran in the other direction. A recruit would be asked to arrive as a preferred walk-on with a spoken promise of a scholarship in January or the following August, when room opened. Sometimes the promise was kept. A spoken promise from a coach who is fired in November is worth what the next coach decides it is worth.
Then there was the scholarship given and taken back. A walk-on awarded a one-year scholarship in a lean recruiting year could be moved off it when a full class arrived. This was within the rules, since the award had only ever been for a year. It was also a way of using walk-ons as a buffer that absorbed the swings in a roster's numbers.
Finally, the academic package. A player with strong grades could be steered toward institutional merit aid in place of an athletic scholarship, leaving one of the 85 free for someone else. The manual's rules on aid to recruited players were written to police exactly this, and they made it harder without making it impossible.
All of these depended on two limits: 85 total and a capped number of new scholarships each year. The annual cap was suspended once the transfer portal opened and has not come back, and the 85 was replaced by the roster limit in 2025. With no scholarship count left to manage at settlement schools, the blueshirt has lost its purpose there. What remains is the plain version of the relationship: a roster place, with or without money.
Walking on outside FBS
Everything above describes the top subdivision. Below it the word means something looser, because the line between scholarship and non-scholarship players is blurred by partial awards.
In the Football Championship Subdivision, football has been an equivalency sport: a fixed pool of scholarship value divided among a larger number of players. A coach might split the pool so that a starting tackle gets a full award, a backup gets half, and a freshman gets books. A player on a quarter scholarship is not a walk-on by the rulebook, but his family's tuition bill does not look very different from one. The mechanics of that subdivision are in our guide to FBS vs FCS. Division II works the same way with a smaller pool.
Division III is the purest case. Its schools award no athletic scholarships at all, so in the strict sense every player on every Division III roster is a walk-on. Nobody uses the word that way. Division III players are recruited hard, admitted through the regular process and aided on academic merit or financial need like any other student. Rosters there can be very large, since the only limits are the coach's patience and the size of the locker room.
The Ivy League and the Pioneer Football League play Division I football on the same no-athletic-aid footing.
Junior college as the other route
A player with no Division I offer has a second option that Bennett's career illustrates: go somewhere he can play. Junior college football offers game film against real competition in place of a year on a scout team, and a productive season there can produce the scholarship offer that high school did not. The trade-offs are real. Junior college seasons have traditionally been counted against a player's eligibility, and the facilities and support are a long way from an FBS program's.
Which path is better depends on what the player lacks. One who needs size and coaching may be better served walking on. One who needs film and playing time may be better served leaving. For the rest of our American coverage, the USA guides hub has the full index.
Rudy and the myth of the walk-on
November 8, 1975, Notre Dame Stadium, the last home game of the season. Notre Dame led Georgia Tech 24-3 in the closing seconds when Daniel Ruettiger, a 27-year-old senior listed at 5-foot-6, went in at defensive end. He played three snaps: a kickoff and two plays on defense. On the last one he sacked the Georgia Tech quarterback. Teammates carried him off the field.
That is the documented part, and it is the foundation of the 1993 film Rudy, which has done more than any rulebook to fix the idea of the walk-on in American minds.
The film gets the texture right. Ruettiger had been turned down by Notre Dame more than once and spent two years at Holy Cross College across the road before he was admitted. He had served in the Navy and was older than his teammates. He paid his own way. He spent two seasons on the scout team being knocked down by players far bigger than he was, with no realistic prospect of playing. He did not dress for games. All of that is ordinary walk-on life, shown accurately, and it is why former walk-ons tend to like the movie more than critics do.
What the film left out or made up
The best scene in the film did not happen. In the movie, Notre Dame's seniors file into coach Dan Devine's office one by one and lay their jerseys on his desk, offering to give up their places so that Rudy can dress. No such protest took place. Devine, by the accounts of people who were there, had intended to dress Ruettiger for the final home game and was the one who put him in. He agreed to let the screenplay cast him as the obstacle and was unhappy with how far it went.
The chanting crowd is also the filmmakers' addition, according to players on that team. Joe Montana, a sophomore quarterback on the 1975 roster, has said publicly that the stadium was not calling Rudy's name the way the film's finale shows.
The larger distortion is one of emphasis. Rudy presents the walk-on's reward as a single moment granted by sentiment. The players in the sections above were not rewarded with a moment. Renfrow, Watt and Mayfield were better than the scholarship players they were competing with, and the system, slowly and without much ceremony, noticed. The film's version is more moving. The other version is more common, and under a 105-player roster it is the only one a walk-on can plan around.