Thirty-two years ago today, a collegiate superstar with one year of NCAA eligibility remaining left school early for the pros.
But the player wasn’t entering the 1983 NFL Draft.
Instead, Georgia tailback Herschel Walker was signing on with the United States Football League’s New Jersey Generals. Per various published reports of the time, the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner initially received between $3.9 million and $5 million on a three-year deal with the Generals. (A hat tip to on-this-day.com for pointing this out.)
At the time, the NFL did not allow players with NCAA eligibility remaining to enter the league. And so Walker — still not yet even 20 years old — made the jump to the USFL. In his three seasons in the fledgling league, Walker put up giant numbers, exceeding 7,000 rushing-receiving yards.
In 1986, Walker jumped to the NFL, receiving a five-year, $5 million contract from Dallas, which drafted him the previous year in Round Five. In his third season with Dallas, Walker racked up 1,514 yards on the ground and 505 yards receiving, garnering Pro Bowl honors.
The next year, though, Walker was gone, off to Minnesota for a massive bundle of draft picks, including three first-rounders. Walker would exceed 1,000 yards rushing just once more, racking up 1,015 yards in 1992 for Philadelphia. The Cowboys, meanwhile, would use the picks from the Walker deal to help build a three-time Super Bowl winner.
In all, Walker tallied 13,084 yards from scrimmage in his 12-season NFL career. Though he is not a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his Georgia legacy is secure, and he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1999.
The Herschel Walker story has several major chapters unique to his time. If Walker would have come of age in, say, 1992, he likely would have declared early for the NFL draft; two years earlier, the NFL had relaxed its early-entry rules, allowing more players to forfeit their eligibility and enter the league. By then, the USFL was gone, and the NFL — as it is now — was the only serious, high-paying option for the best of the best in college football.
The 1989 trade that sent Walker to Minnesota was a function of its era, too; it’s hard to see any club ever again surrendering multiple first-round picks for a tailback. Walker was always going to have a hard time living up to expectations, given what the Vikings gave up.
On the other hand, Walker came of age at a time when the running back position was highly valued, and he negotiated a series of lucrative deals for himself. Yes, life would have been different for Herschel Walker had he come along a generation later. He would have been an NFL player from the start, and he might have made more money. But he would also be entering a league that doesn’t quite value tailback talent like it did 30 years ago.
