Tanner McEvoy - The Dairy Raid Before They Were Badgers
This is the next entry in a new series in which I am looking back at some of our favorite former Badgers. These are players that when they left high school were quarterbacks, but by the time they finished their careers in Madison they were playing other positions. Today we're going to take a look at a player who, to be fair, got to play some quarterback at Wisconsin but is a player that I would say was ahead of his time in terms of his playing style. And that is Tanner McEvoy.
Tanner McEvoy was brought in to run a spread-style offense. That's what Gary Andersen was expecting to bring with him from Utah State. However, what ended up happening is his offensive coordinator, Andy Ludwig, decided to just run the standard Wisconsin offense that we had been running in Madison for, at that point, 20 years and that we continued to run until the 2023 season without many changes. By running an offense like that with a quarterback like Tanner is you're taking a round peg and trying to jam it into a square hole. As evidenced on film in high school and his junior college, he has the ability to play quarterback at a high level. He had a good arm, could throw on the move, and all the other hallmarks of a quarterback in the spread offense. But when you ask him to fit into a pro-style game, it's a bad mix of hardware and software. That's why he struggled at quarterback initially, why he was eventually replaced with old Stave, and when Paul Chryst came in, he was switched to defense/slash Wildcat quarterback. It has nothing to do with his inability to play quarterback. It has a lot to do with the coaching staff's inability to use him the way his skill set should be used.
If you took an athlete like Tanner McEvoy and put him in and offense like today's Wisconsin offense imagine what he could have done. But what you ended up having was coaching staffs who just either didn't have the balls to run it or didn't have the knowledge to know how to put the offense into the 21st century. So we are left with a huge "what if" question with Tanner McEvoy. What if he had played quarterback? What if they had used him correctly? How would Melvin Gordon's record-breaking 2014 season have looked with a quarterback running zone read to keep the defense honest, running RPOs off of his runs, and running an offense built athletes in a system that would take advantage of them? It's a great question and one that we will never know the answer to. It'll be something interesting to compare going forward as the offense moves towards modern football.