Head of the class: Elite NFL draft prospect transforms from academic question mark to college graduate
Major colleges kept their distance. Intrigued by Will Hernandez’s size and potential, they were tempted to bring him on. But in the end, they wouldn’t touch him.
The concern was never whether Hernandez could perform on Saturdays. The question was what he would do Monday through Friday, in the classroom. With inferior grades, Hernandez’s academic performance answered that question for them.
By the time Hernandez qualified to play in college about a month after national signing day, Southern California and Arizona State, two Pac-12 schools that initially showed interest in him, had backed off. One of Nevada’s most elite high school athletes — he competed in track and wrestling in addition to playing football— was left with one program in pursuit: Texas-El Paso (UTEP), among the least successful college football outfits in the nation.
“It was a grade issue; I lost a lot of scholarships,” Hernandez told the El Paso Times last year. “UTEP was there for me and I decided to roll with them.”
If that’s where Hernandez’s story ended, at the doorstep of unfulfilled potential, a hard line would be drawn right here. Not only would it be a blemish on his future, but it would extinguish the candle of hope for a lot people like him.
People in all walks of life for whom the light takes time to illuminate. People who take the long route when the more direct path lay before them. People for whom victories are molded through toil and trial.
Today, Hernandez is a high-profile NFL draft prospect who’s sure to be selected in the early rounds of the draft after back-to-back All-America seasons for the Miners. At the Senior Bowl, a showcase for the top college seniors entering the professional ranks, Hernandez, playing guard, blew scouts away his power, footwork and intensity.
At UTEP, the Miners did not win a game all year. It wasn’t clear whether his success on a bad team and in Conference USA would measure up when he encountered higher caliber competition.
It was a lot like the challenge he faced when stepped onto a college campus: Could he measure up?
Hernandez redshirted as a freshman and in 2014, the fall of his second year, he told his high school coach he wanted to quit. Chaparral coach Bill Froman made the 13-hour drive from Las Vegas to El Paso, but it wasn’t to bring Hernandez back home. Rather, he encouraged him to gut it out, according to a 2014 Las Vegas Review-Journal article. He’d continue to make the trip to see Hernandez play.
It wasn’t hard for Hernandez to show grit and fight when lined up across from a defensive lineman determined to flatten him on his rear. He fought with all he had to protect his quarterback and open holes for his running back.
But if high school was hard, college was surely harder.
Hernandez didn’t quit — not on football and not on himself.
He graduated in December with a degree in kinesiology. Five years after the biggest programs in the nation had to turn away from him, NFL teams are knocking on his door.
They’ll find a guard, at 6-foot-2 and 328 pounds, capable of driving back someone trying to bulldoze their way through the gut of an interior line.
But they’ll find something more. His perspective on playing for an 0–12 team as a senior speaks volumes about what he has done in football, and more importantly, what he did in turning a rough start into tremendous achievements.
“It was never an option for me just to throw in the towel or just give up on the season just because we were losing games or we hadn’t won,” he said at the NFL Scouting Combine. “Even though it was the worst feeling ever, I could never live with myself knowing that I just gave up. If you’re gonna do that, you might as well not even be there.”
