Wisconsin made a splash this offseason when it added Miami (FL) transfer quarterback Tyler Van Dyke. Head coach Luke Fickell has not officially named him the starter, but he was very complimentary of him at Big Ten Media Days in Indianapolis on Tuesday.
Redshirt sophomore Braedyn Locke is the top returning signal caller on the Badgers roster, but Van Dyke has made ten times as many starts at the college level, and the way that Van Dyke has embraced the battle with Locke has stood out to Fickell.
“He understood that it was going to be a battle, there weren’t going to be keys that were just handed to him,” Fickell said. “The greatest thing about Tyler is his ability to say, ‘I need to refocus.’ I understand what his goals were individually. He knew there were things that he needed to continue to grow to do and he experienced an incredible amount of adversity in his three years of starting down at Miami.”
According to On3, Van Dyke was the 12th-best quarterback in the transfer portal this offseason. In three seasons as a starter with the Hurricanes, he totaled nearly 7,500 passing yards, 54 touchdowns and 23 interceptions.
As a former top high school recruit from Glastonbury, Conn., he committed to Miami and head coach Manny Diaz at the time. He stayed with the program through the transition to head coach Mario Cristobal and three different offensive coordinators.
“For me, if you said what’s the greatest thing that you liked when you were identifying Tyler Van Dyke? I would say, all of the adversity that he’s been through, the ability to handle three different coordinators, the ability for him to go from the East Coast down to South Florida, win a starting position, have the ups and down, be willing to stand tall and have the confidence to continue to play at the level he was expected to play,” Fickell said.
Heading into year two of the Fickell era in Madison, Van Dyke will replace fellow transfer portal QB Tanner Mordecai from last season. The route of bringing in essentially a one-year rental option at the position has become commonplace in the sport. The times that it has worked is when the player fully entrenches themselves in the new system and Van Dyke has seemed to do that.
“Tyler Van Dyke has walked in and embraced everything with our program,” Fickell said. “[He] understood what he was walking into year one, the ups and the downs, the things that we need from him. He’s got a humility behind himself when he walked in the door and understood that he was going to have to earn everything.”
Wisconsin’s new quarterback might have tools to be a top performer in the Big Ten, which the Badgers will need to turn around last season’s disappointing offense.
