The Big 12 walk-on rule that gave Baker Mayfield a year back

Why a walk-on transfer cost him a season

Mayfield had no major scholarship offers out of Lake Travis High School near Austin, ESPN reported in 2017. He walked on at Texas Tech in 2013 and, per ESPN's Jenna Laine, became the first true freshman walk-on quarterback to start a season opener at a BCS school. He started seven games and was named Big 12 Freshman Offensive Player of the Year. Texas Tech still never offered him a scholarship, CBS Sports noted.

He wrote that his heart "wasn't really in Lubbock" and that Oklahoma meant much more to him. The catch was a Big 12 rule: a player who transferred within the conference had to sit out a season and lost a year of eligibility, whether or not he had ever been on scholarship. So he walked on a second time, at Oklahoma, sat out 2014 on the scout team, and won the starting job for 2015.

Two votes, two days in June 2016

By then he was a star. In 2015 he was Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year and finished fourth in the Heisman voting, Sports Illustrated reported. Yet the lost season still stood, which left him one more year at Oklahoma instead of two.

On Wednesday, June 1, 2016, the conference's 10 faculty athletic representatives voted 5-5 on a proposal to let walk-ons transfer within the league without losing that year. A tie meant it failed. Commissioner Bob Bowlsby explained the worry: schools feared rivals would poach their walk-ons with scholarship offers.

The next day the representatives met again with a narrower version. It covered only walk-ons who had no written scholarship offer from their current school, which answered the poaching concern directly. It passed 7-3, CBS Sports and NFL.com reported, and it applied to Mayfield. NFL.com recorded his reply on Twitter: "And y'all thought you were getting rid of me...."

Without that second vote, CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated both pointed out, his route to a 2017 season ran through a graduate transfer to a school outside the Big 12. I could not find any sign he had actually picked one, so what that alternate year would have looked like is anyone's guess.

What the returned year produced

In 2017 he threw for 4,340 yards and 41 touchdowns, ran for five more, and set a Heisman record with a 203.76 passer rating. He won the trophy on December 9, 2017, with 732 first-place votes. The Heisman Trust called him the first winner to start his career as a walk-on since athletic scholarships began in the 1950s.

My honest read is that a faculty committee's second meeting deserves a footnote in Heisman history. The rule it wrote was narrow and sensible, and it was about walk-ons generally, not one quarterback. Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops called it the right thing to do. The player who smiled on the River Walk simply happened to be the first to spend the year it gave back, and he spent it very well.