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sandgk
Watson, Crick & A Twist
The saddest part about this? Arguably his best years were ahead of him. Though constantly inked at Northwestern to new contracts he could have had his choices at several other programs - or of had that one dream season, say when the schedule went light on Big10 top dogs.
I expect that the season opener between Miami (OH) and Northwestern will feature a meaningful remembrance of his name and deeds, with both schools.
Props to all who went over to sign the condolence card for Randy, (the buckeye thread is, surprises me little, the largest and longest) and rep jwins for the pointer while you are at.
I expect that the season opener between Miami (OH) and Northwestern will feature a meaningful remembrance of his name and deeds, with both schools.
Props to all who went over to sign the condolence card for Randy, (the buckeye thread is, surprises me little, the largest and longest) and rep jwins for the pointer while you are at.
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Damn, we were at Wrigley Field today, soaking in the atmosphere of a Cubs/Sox pregame, and they announced it and had a moment of silence before the game...everyone seemed pretty stunned, and I know I was. Hate to see this happen to anyone that young...prayers and condolences to his family.
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BuckBackHome
Wolverine is largest member of weasel family
I just saw this in tonight's paper. My thoughts and prayers go out to his entire family and the NW community.
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IronBuckI
Calmer than you are.
Really? Are you kidding me?
Purple Reign thread
Sorry, but the Head Coach passes away, and they're taking donations for the football team? Seems like the family might need the donations rather than a university like Northwestern.
Purple Reign thread
Sorry, but the Head Coach passes away, and they're taking donations for the football team? Seems like the family might need the donations rather than a university like Northwestern.
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perhaps walker wanted it that way... his heart condition was known in advance (tho he was hopeful that he was doing better, according to spiels on 1460).
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sandgk
Watson, Crick & A Twist
Well normally, if any such kind of dedication announcement is made it will be with the full and complete agreement, assent and consent of the grieving family.
I will assume that this is how the above was handled. That being the case, it being in compliance with the family's wishes, I see no problem.
(Should Tammy Walker issue a statement distancing the family from the NU football funding Randy Walker Fund, then there would be an issue - otherwise, it is what the family wants.)
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tibor75
Banned
At least show some respect for a deceased Big Ten coach and fellow Ohioan.
So, it makes a difference if he was from Utah and coached in the PAC 10? A person is a person. I never bashed the guy. I just found it curious how just because he died people had a completely different opinon of him.
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Captain Hindsight
The Hero of the Modern Age
Nice to have you back...
People are just paying respect to a good coach of a big conference school, and if you have a problem with that because people are crowning him a "saint," then please do us all a favor, and keep your negative comments to yourself.
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craigblitz
Juice, Full of Juice!!
You would have a point if the people who replied where the people who called him dirty. Maybe they did but you provided no proof of that. Maybe the people who have replied to this thread has always held him in high regard.
To disrespect a person who has just passed away so you can fulfill your role as the jackass who likes to go against the grain and ruffle feathers is classless and uncalled for. You have crossed the line dude... it is a sad reflection of what you are about. Even if he was considered dirty, I assure you he was a postive influence of hundreds of young men who passed through his program.
Anyway, I posted this in the Bobby Carpenter thread. Rob Carpenter was a close friend of Randy and his passing will have an impact with him and the rest of the family.
I pray that his family and friends can find peace and comfort through these trying times. RIP Mr.Walker.
To disrespect a person who has just passed away so you can fulfill your role as the jackass who likes to go against the grain and ruffle feathers is classless and uncalled for. You have crossed the line dude... it is a sad reflection of what you are about. Even if he was considered dirty, I assure you he was a postive influence of hundreds of young men who passed through his program.
Anyway, I posted this in the Bobby Carpenter thread. Rob Carpenter was a close friend of Randy and his passing will have an impact with him and the rest of the family.
I pray that his family and friends can find peace and comfort through these trying times. RIP Mr.Walker.
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Comments from SI's Stewart Mandel, who went to Northwestern.
si.com
When impartiality is an impossibility
Death of Northwestern's Walker hits too close to home
Posted: Friday June 30, 2006 1:49PM; Updated: Friday June 30, 2006 3:41PM
As a national college football columnist, I go out of my way to have an impartial perspective on everything I write. Today, however, that's simply not possible.
I'll admit it. I have a soft spot for Northwestern. How could I not? I spent four of the most fulfilling years of my life on the Evanston, Ill., campus, and as a euphoric, wide-eyed sophomore I stood in the stands in Pasadena on New Year's Day in 1996 witnessing the improbable, historic culmination of one of the biggest Cinderella stories in sports history. That experience cemented my passion for college football and precipitated a career spent following the sport.
These days I'm usually too wrapped up in the trials and tribulations of any number of other football programs -- USC, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida State, etc. -- to keep close tabs on the boys in purple, but from time to time my college friends and I will engage in the type of e-mail dialogue that I'm sure is common practice for alums of nearly every team in the country.
Off and on for the past few months, in fact, we'd been engaged in a fiery debate, the most recent round of which took place just the other day. The subject: Is Randy Walker a good coach? His supporters among the group pointed to the school's unprecedented string of three straight six-win seasons, the three bowl bids in six years -- as many as Northwestern had in its entire previous history -- and Walker's undeniable role in creating one of the nation's most innovative and explosive spread offenses. His detractors brought up the years and years of atrocious defenses, the mind-numbing series of special-teams gaffes and the inability to get back to those glorious, Rose-colored days of the mid-'90s.
Suddenly, it all seems so trite.
Walker, Northwestern's coach of seven seasons, died on Thursday night from an apparent heart attack. This would be a sad story to cover no matter the coach or the school. But when that school happens to be your alma mater -- and when these type of stories seem to keep happening there far more often than any one community should have to bear -- sad simply isn't a descriptive enough adjective. To be honest, I can't think of one that is.
I had only talked to Walker a few times for stories, most recently last October for a Sports Illustrated piece on quarterback Brett Basanez, but that's about all I needed to get a sense of the terminally upbeat personality I'd heard so much about from those who follow the team more closely. Walker was an Ohio-bred, Woody Hayes-admiring, old-school-to-the-core football guy, which made him an unlikely character not only to embrace but to play as big a role as any other coach in the country in fostering the sport's recent craze toward the spread offense.
It's hard to argue with the results. Last year Northwestern's offense, behind a quarterback (Basanez) who would go undrafted, a smallish running back (Tyrell Sutton) who was overlooked by most other major programs and a group of receivers that weren't about to blow anyone's stopwatch, averaged 500 yards a game, fourth nationally. It was a testament to just how powerful an equalizer the spread can be when put in the hands of a smart and efficient quarterback like Basanez. It was very much the same recipe that helped Utah -- whose coach at the time, Urban Meyer, once said he fell in love with the spread while watching Northwestern's wild 54-51 victory over Michigan in 2000 -- to its improbable 12-0 season two years ago. When I asked Walker at Big Ten media day last year about his seemingly radical change of philosophy, from old-school power football at Miami (Ohio) to the newfangled spread in Evanston, he had a pretty colorful answer: "It's as if all those years we were playing football in a phone booth," he said.
Northwestern has lost a whole lot more than a creative offensive mind, however. Every year a bunch of college coaches get fired, and every time you hear the same sentiments of "shock" being expressed by the players who have just lost their leader. Suffice it to say, this is a whole other type of shock. The sitting head coach of a Big Ten football program has died, at the peak of his career. It seems so unfathomable, and yet, for anyone connected to Northwestern athletics, these types of tragedies have somehow become a way of life.
In 1998, Matt Hartl, the starting fullback on that '95 Rose Bowl team -- the guy who caught the deciding touchdown pass in that season's breakthrough victory over Michigan -- succumbed to Hodgkin's disease at age 23. Another football player, Bobby Russ, was shot to death by a Chicago police officer during a routine traffic stop that same year.
In 1999, in a tragedy so senseless I still have trouble writing the words, Ricky Byrdsong, the ever-affable Wildcats basketball coach from 1994 to '97, whose teams I covered for the school paper, was gunned down by a white supremacist while jogging with his children in his suburban Chicago neighborhood. And two years later, in an incident that became a subject of much national scrutiny, Rashidi Wheeler, a starting safety for the football team, died while participating in a summer conditioning drill.
I realize these are hardly the only college coaches and players in recent years who have died before their time. We were all stunned by the death of Army women's basketball coach Maggie Dixon earlier this year. My journalistic instinct tells me to treat all such stories with the same detached perspective. But in this case, I'm sorry, I just can't do it.
Maybe next week the college football writer in me will return and tell you what this all means for Northwestern's football program, the Big Ten and the coaching profession. Today, however, I'm just another saddened alum.
si.com
When impartiality is an impossibility
Death of Northwestern's Walker hits too close to home
Posted: Friday June 30, 2006 1:49PM; Updated: Friday June 30, 2006 3:41PM
As a national college football columnist, I go out of my way to have an impartial perspective on everything I write. Today, however, that's simply not possible.
I'll admit it. I have a soft spot for Northwestern. How could I not? I spent four of the most fulfilling years of my life on the Evanston, Ill., campus, and as a euphoric, wide-eyed sophomore I stood in the stands in Pasadena on New Year's Day in 1996 witnessing the improbable, historic culmination of one of the biggest Cinderella stories in sports history. That experience cemented my passion for college football and precipitated a career spent following the sport.
These days I'm usually too wrapped up in the trials and tribulations of any number of other football programs -- USC, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida State, etc. -- to keep close tabs on the boys in purple, but from time to time my college friends and I will engage in the type of e-mail dialogue that I'm sure is common practice for alums of nearly every team in the country.
Off and on for the past few months, in fact, we'd been engaged in a fiery debate, the most recent round of which took place just the other day. The subject: Is Randy Walker a good coach? His supporters among the group pointed to the school's unprecedented string of three straight six-win seasons, the three bowl bids in six years -- as many as Northwestern had in its entire previous history -- and Walker's undeniable role in creating one of the nation's most innovative and explosive spread offenses. His detractors brought up the years and years of atrocious defenses, the mind-numbing series of special-teams gaffes and the inability to get back to those glorious, Rose-colored days of the mid-'90s.
Suddenly, it all seems so trite.
Walker, Northwestern's coach of seven seasons, died on Thursday night from an apparent heart attack. This would be a sad story to cover no matter the coach or the school. But when that school happens to be your alma mater -- and when these type of stories seem to keep happening there far more often than any one community should have to bear -- sad simply isn't a descriptive enough adjective. To be honest, I can't think of one that is.
I had only talked to Walker a few times for stories, most recently last October for a Sports Illustrated piece on quarterback Brett Basanez, but that's about all I needed to get a sense of the terminally upbeat personality I'd heard so much about from those who follow the team more closely. Walker was an Ohio-bred, Woody Hayes-admiring, old-school-to-the-core football guy, which made him an unlikely character not only to embrace but to play as big a role as any other coach in the country in fostering the sport's recent craze toward the spread offense.
It's hard to argue with the results. Last year Northwestern's offense, behind a quarterback (Basanez) who would go undrafted, a smallish running back (Tyrell Sutton) who was overlooked by most other major programs and a group of receivers that weren't about to blow anyone's stopwatch, averaged 500 yards a game, fourth nationally. It was a testament to just how powerful an equalizer the spread can be when put in the hands of a smart and efficient quarterback like Basanez. It was very much the same recipe that helped Utah -- whose coach at the time, Urban Meyer, once said he fell in love with the spread while watching Northwestern's wild 54-51 victory over Michigan in 2000 -- to its improbable 12-0 season two years ago. When I asked Walker at Big Ten media day last year about his seemingly radical change of philosophy, from old-school power football at Miami (Ohio) to the newfangled spread in Evanston, he had a pretty colorful answer: "It's as if all those years we were playing football in a phone booth," he said.
Northwestern has lost a whole lot more than a creative offensive mind, however. Every year a bunch of college coaches get fired, and every time you hear the same sentiments of "shock" being expressed by the players who have just lost their leader. Suffice it to say, this is a whole other type of shock. The sitting head coach of a Big Ten football program has died, at the peak of his career. It seems so unfathomable, and yet, for anyone connected to Northwestern athletics, these types of tragedies have somehow become a way of life.
In 1998, Matt Hartl, the starting fullback on that '95 Rose Bowl team -- the guy who caught the deciding touchdown pass in that season's breakthrough victory over Michigan -- succumbed to Hodgkin's disease at age 23. Another football player, Bobby Russ, was shot to death by a Chicago police officer during a routine traffic stop that same year.
In 1999, in a tragedy so senseless I still have trouble writing the words, Ricky Byrdsong, the ever-affable Wildcats basketball coach from 1994 to '97, whose teams I covered for the school paper, was gunned down by a white supremacist while jogging with his children in his suburban Chicago neighborhood. And two years later, in an incident that became a subject of much national scrutiny, Rashidi Wheeler, a starting safety for the football team, died while participating in a summer conditioning drill.
I realize these are hardly the only college coaches and players in recent years who have died before their time. We were all stunned by the death of Army women's basketball coach Maggie Dixon earlier this year. My journalistic instinct tells me to treat all such stories with the same detached perspective. But in this case, I'm sorry, I just can't do it.
Maybe next week the college football writer in me will return and tell you what this all means for Northwestern's football program, the Big Ten and the coaching profession. Today, however, I'm just another saddened alum.
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