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MADISON, Wis. - Wisconsin’s young cornerbacks know the challenge they will be facing when the Badgers start playing games this fall. After losing senior Derrick Tindal to graduation and junior Nick Nelson to the NFL a year early, Wisconsin’s cornerback corps is going to make for an appealing target for the offenses they face this year.
There is no point hiding from the test they are going to have to face - so the leaders of Wisconsin’s youth movement at cornerback are embracing it.
“We’re a young group,” Faion Hicks, a redshirt freshman, said Thursday after practice. “Our oldest player is a redshirt sophomore - that’s an OC’s dream.”
It’s true - Wisconsin’s top cornerback in 2018 will be Dontye Carriere-Williams, a redshirt sophomore who served as the team’s No. 3 cornerback in 2017. Carriere-Williams played in all 14 games for the Badgers last year - making him easily the team’s most experienced cornerback. In fact, Wisconsin’s nine scholarship cornerbacks will start the 2018 season with just 25 games played between them (all coming in 2017): 14 for Carriere-Williams, nine for sophomore Madison Cone, and two for redshirt sophomore Caesar Williams.
The Badgers are all but starting from scratch at the position, and their depth this spring is a little thinner with Carriere-Williams sidelined with an injury during the first few practices. That’s left Cone and Hicks as the “starting” cornerbacks who work with the first team defense, with Williams and incoming freshman Donte Burton getting reps with the second team.
But for a group that has so much to prove this year, Wisconsin’s cornerbacks are not lacking in confidence as they try to win jobs of their own and keep the defense as a whole operating at a high level.
“That’s been our whole motivation,” Cone said Thursday. “Every time the DBs get together, it’s always ‘We lost a lot of players.’ But at the same time we feel like we’ve got a bunch of young guys that we feel like we can step up and not drop off at all.”
“There’s a standard around here - we’ve got to hold ourselves to a certain level. The guys that are here now, we don’t think that we’re dropping off at all. We feel like we’ve got a treat for everybody (at) game one.”
Part of that confidence comes from playing cornerback in general - it’s a position that demands the confidence to go out and compete on every route without letting past failures get in the way of future success. But the Badgers also seem to be reaping the benefits of having a few of their cornerbacks enroll early as freshmen - giving them an extra semester to learn the defense and get adjusted to college life. Getting an extra three months with the team might not seem like a lot of time, but the players who got on campus early last year - Hicks and Cone - believe that it helped put them in a spot where they could contribute to the defense this year.
“It’s definitely been a jump,” Cone said. “From last year to this year I’ve definitely felt a jump in confidence. On the football field I feel like (I made) a jump from 3 to 10. Coming from high school, everybody is the man where they’re coming from from. I’m really learning how to play the position and then just learning technique. “
Cone said his extra semester was useful just to get him focused on playing football full time after spending more of his time playing basketball in high school.
“I didn’t take football seriously until my senior year,” Cone said. “I didn’t really do any summer workouts or anything, I was just athletic and more quick than a lot of guys in high school. And then I got here, and it was a whirlwind. Everybody is quick, everybody is fast. It was more about learning the technique - when I got here I was basically starting from scratch. I didn’t really know any technique or anything.”
Hicks echoed the same feeling, saying that he benefited from getting an extra semester to learn from defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard and the rest of the coaching staff.
“Just (to) compete,” Hicks said when asked what the coaches are asking of him and his position group this spring. “Go out there and compete, build confidence. As a young group that’s what you have to do - build confidence in yourself and play your game. But at the same time, use your technique. We’ve just been learning a lot as far as what to do in certain situations. Right now we’re building our confidence and building our mind for the game.”
If the Badgers can use this time in the spring to continue building their confidence and refining their technique, they could well make good on their promise to surprise people this fall.
It won’t be easy to pick up where guys like Tindal and Nelson left off, but it doesn’t sound like Wisconsin’s defensive backs were caught off guard by the challenge of replacing them. They know it’s their time to step up.
“One thing I like about this group, we kind of accept that,” Hicks said. “We like that people are doubting us. Everybody is looking at us to step up, and that’s what you want. That’s what you dream of - to prove everybody wrong.”
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John Veldhuis covers Wisconsin football, basketball and recruiting for BadgerBlitz.com on the Rivals.com network. Follow him on Twitter at @JohnVeldhuis.
