The legend of Joe Spivak
By now you’ve probably heard of Joe Spivak.
The defensive tackle unwittingly hijacked Northwestern’s signing day last Wednesday. The Wildcats unveiled their 19 new scholarship players and it was this walkon from Chicago’s Western suburbs who stole the show.
It wasn’t the defensive end who played in the prestigious U.S. Army All-America Bowl (Earnest Brown) or the other defensive end who turned down Jim Harbaugh and Michigan (Trevor Kent). It wasn't the two players who already enrolled ( defensive end Sam Miller and superback Trey Pugh).
It was this little ball of energy, as wide as he is tall, with the funny pictures that went viral on Twitter, who upstaged them all.
The main reason for the sudden celebrity is that the unranked defensive tackle from Lombard (Ill.) Montini famously turned down a last-minute scholarship offer from Michigan State to walk on at Northwestern. Add in that he looks more like a Saturday Night Live character than a football player and you begin to understand why Spivak became a bit of a cult hero last week.
But that only tells part of the story. Spivak (SPEE-vack) has a personality as big as waistline. He is the clown prince of Northwestern’s 2017 class, destined to become a fan favorite in Evanston regardless of how his career turns out on the field.
So we begin with Spivak by posing the obvious question: How in the world does a player turn down a free ride at Michigan State – a program that’s won three of the last six league titles – to play without a scholarship at Northwestern?
It was nothing against the Spartans, says Spivak, who was honored by the offer. His sister goes to MSU, so he’s been there multiple times and knows the campus well. It was the people associated with the Northwestern program that made the difference to him.
“I’m really lucky to be in a situation where my parents were okay with me turning down the opportunity at Michigan State,” said Spivak last week. “They know it’s been something I’ve been working for since fourth grade, to play big-time football.
“And yeah, Michigan State is Power Five, but it goes back to the academics and the type of people at Northwestern…they are people I feel can change my life. I believe that the people you surround yourself with can make you a better person.”
It goes a little deeper than that, however. You see, walking on is a Spivak family tradition, something that seems to be in their DNA.
His father, Joe Spivak Sr., walked on the Illinois State football team and wound up becoming a two-time captain and all All-America offensive lineman for the Redbirds. (His offensive line coach, incidentally, was Northwestern superbacks coach Bob Heffner.) His sister Courtney was a walkon swimmer at Illinois and Lexi did the same at Missouri. (His youngest sister, Jordan, goes to Michigan State but is not an athlete.)
Spivak, in fact, collected a total of 17 scholarship offers, from MSU, as well as schools from the Ivy League (Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale), MAC (Central Michigan, Kent State), Mountain West (Air Force, Nevada, Wyoming) and FCS (Illinois State, Western Illinois) and a few others.
Yet he turned them all down for a chance to become a walkon.
“I think a walkon is a special person who plays for the love of the game,” he said. “I like to think I’m special and what I’m doing is special.”
Northwestern head coach Pat Fitzgerald certainly agrees. He just saw Wildcat redshirt senior Austin Carr go from a walkon to winning the Richter–Howard Receiver of the Year as the top receiver in the Big Ten this season.
“They’re the backbone of your program,” Fitzgerald said on signing day. “They’re the guys that have the academic credentials to get into school on their own, and they just want to play Big Ten football and maybe they turn down scholarships, they turn down scholarships at the lower level maybe because they want to experience the full package: they want to play Big Ten football and they want to opportunity to receive one of the highest rated academic experiences in the world.
“If I’m a CEO in the Fortune 500 in America, the first thing I’m doing is calling myself and probably Coach (David) Shaw at Stanford and say, ‘Can I talk to you about your walkons?’”
Spivak looks at NU walkons like Carr, Zeke Markshausen, J.B. Butler and even Bo Cisek -- a kindred spirit as defensive tackle who wore the coveted No. 1 jersey as a team leader as a senior -- and gets inspired.
“At Northwestern, you have an opportunity to compete for a starting job,” he said. “At other schools, walkons don’t mean anything to them.”
Very few recruits know the Northwestern program better than Spivak. Fitzgerald said that “he’s been in our football camp since he was in the first grade.”
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but Spivak went to every camp since he was a freshman at Montini. He’d go to the one-day prospects camp and then come back for the Chicagoland Showcase camp the next week for another one.
Spivak got noticed by plenty of college coaches at those camps, but he never showed Northwestern coaches quite enough to earn that scholarship offer he dreamed about.
There are some guys who just look like football players. Joe Spivak is not one of those guys. He’s 5-foot-11 and 287 pounds, a bowling ball with appendages.
While most people would tell you those are far from ideal dimensions for a defensive tackle, Spivak has flipped that notion on its head. To him, he has the advantage in terms of size.
“The motto of my career is to never let size define my skill set,” he says. “I've been hearing since I was in fourth grade that on the line, low man wins. Well, I'm already down there. What's the big deal? It'll be easier for me."
And make no mistake. The kid can play.
“Spivak was simply one of the hardest working kids I've covered in many years,” said Rivals recruiting expert Edgy Tim O’Halloran, who has been evaluating Illinois football players since a kid by the name of Fitzgerald came out of Orland Park High School in 1993. “Spivak, while admittedly undersized, uses his exceptional quickness, bend, explosiveness and pure power to beat all comers.”
O’Halloran in a tweet called Spivak “an absolute steal as a preferred walk-on. Comes to work everyday and just beats people daily.”
A lot of people on signing day tweeted about Spivak. Rivals Josh Helmholdt called him “one of the legends of #NSD2017.” Some of his funnier pictures went viral as he captured the imaginations of fans across the country, who tweeted things like “So @JoeSpivak is my new favorite player in all of college football.” Yahoo's Dr. Saturday said Spivak “won best walkon” on signing day.
His fellow 2017 signees, many of whom met him on official visit weekend in January, are thrilled to have him in the class. His classmate Pugh tweeted “#SpivakforHeisman.” Every single one of the eight players polled by WildcatReport mentioned Spivak when asked to name the funniest player in the class.
The kid is funny, a bubbly, excitable personality with a quick wit and a self-deprecating sense of humor.
“My aim is to make myself laugh, and I’m into stupid, funny stuff,” he explained. “I think it’s important to laugh at yourself. You can’t take things too seriously.”
Don’t let that court jester fool you, though, because Spivak is no joke in the classroom. He has a 4.1 GPA at Montini (and yes, that’s on a 4.0 scale) and scored a 27 on his ACT. He wants to study Communications and Marketing, and it’s easy to see Spivak in a sales role at some point in future. He’s a natural.
All of the signing day attention was a bit overwhelming to Spivak. He just wants to start his college career as quickly as possible.
And don’t think for a second that Spivak will have any regrets about his decision to decline schoarship offers to play as a walkon at Northwestern. He is just where he wants to be.
His goal is a simple one.
“I want to be remembered at Northwestern,” he says. “I want to be remembered as a guy who walked on and earned a scholarship. I don't want to be given a scholarship. I want to earn one.”
If his career turns out to be anything like his signing day, it’s going to be awfully hard for Wildcat fans to forget Spivak.