The Next Great Football Movie You Won’t Want To Miss
3 min read
At last year’s end-of-the-season college football awards, Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield received the Burlsworth Trophy. It’s an award that is not yet as prestigious as the Walter Camp Award, the Lombardi Award, and many of the others that are bestowed upon college football players on an evening in December. The Burlsworth Trophy is given annually to the most outstanding FBS player who began his career as a walk-on. Now, the nation will have an opportunity to truly understand the meaning of the award.
As the 2016 college football season begins on August 26 with Cal and Hawaii playing in Australia, theaters around the United States will show Greater, quite possibly the greatest story of an FBS walk-on ever. Yes, there are inspirational football films like Rudy, We Are Marshall, and Remember the Titans, and like each of those, Greater is one that the anyone, football fan or not, won’t want to miss.
The film’s main character is one Brandon Burlsworth, a unique individual who pursued a dream and overcame tremendous adversity to become a third-round draft pick, 63rd overall, of the Indianapolis Colts. A young Burlsworth was a not-quite-big-enough but somewhat pudgy high school offensive lineman who was good enough to be selected as an All-State player while at Harrison High School in the small Arkansas town bearing the same name.
Burlsworth’s story is much like the stories of guys like Brandon Weeden, Jordy Nelson, Adam Archuleta, and several others. Somehow, said high school star slips through the cracks and just is not heavily recruited by FBS programs. While Hollywood will portray Burlsworth as not quite worthy of playing FBS football, the real story is that the young man from Harrison was one of the finest recruits ever in the state of Arkansas.
Burlsworth visited Henderson State, a Division II program in Arkansas, and having grown to 300 pounds, ran the 40-yard dash in 5.0. Guys that run that fast at that size usually end up in one place – the NFL. A coach at Henderson State called a staff member at Arkansas, whose head coach at the time was Danny Ford. As a result of that phone call, Burlsworth was on the Razorbacks radar and an offer came to walk-on in the fall of 1994.
When Burlsworth came to Arkansas, he was overweight and in desperate need of some strength training. He did exactly what his coaches told him, lost 50 pounds, and then put it back on as pure muscle. He became a two-time All-SEC lineman and an All-American as a senior in 1998. He was named to the All-SEC Academic Honor Roll each of his four years. It wasn’t just that Burlsworth was great on the field; it was his character. To do things right became to do it the “Burls Way” and that is what will captivate audiences that see Greater.
The story, like many inspirational sports films, does have its share of tragedy. After Burlsworth ran a 4.88 at a shade under 6-foot-4 and 308 pounds at the NFL Combine, he was drafted in the third round of the 1999 draft. Eleven days after the draft, he was killed in a car accident less than 15 miles from his home in Harrison.
Burlsworth was the first football player at Arkansas to ever finish a bachelor’s and a master’s degree before he played his final college football game. His number (77) is one of only two ever retired by the university. Seventeen years after his death, he still has an effect on the Razorbacks program. Now, No. 77 will have a chance to make an impact on the rest of football nation.
