At North Texas, it's the walk-ons who keep the Mean Green running

Harry · August 15, 2015

none have more than Texas.

For 12 days, as teams nationwide dig into preseason drills, USA TODAY Sports’ college football reporters are traversing the state of Texas and visiting each of its one dozen FBS programs. AT&T presents Two Weeks in Texas …

Day 6: North Texas

DENTON, Texas — Mike Canales and Mike Simmonds came to visit Kaydon Kirby in the fall of 2011 with reams of information about North Texas, then in its first football season under Dan McCarney, but without the item Kirby wanted most: a scholarship offer.

Instead, they brought honesty. We like you, they told Kirby, then a under-recruited senior at Flower Mound High School in this county; we just don’t have an offer. But you’re a player, they added, and you could come into our program and make an impact — as a walk-on, with the potential to earn a scholarship during the course of your college career.

“They told me to take a chance, and I trusted them and took the chance,” Kirby said. “I earned my way the hard way. They just want players. No matter how you got here or what your journey was, as long as you’re there to play, then you’re there to play.”

TWO WEEKS IN TEXAS: The series so far

Four years later, Kirby enters his junior season as the Mean Green’s entrenched starting center, as an all-Conference USA selection and national-award candidate, and as the most shining example of what McCarney-led North Texas has done better — and more often — than any program in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Along a wall inside the football program’s offices is a display of 32 faces and names, all former or current North Texas players of varying success, from backup defensive backs through starting offensive linemen, each with a shared starting point: As a former walk-on who “through effort and dedication,” the display reads, was awarded a scholarship.

read more: http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/08/north-texas-mean-green-football-walk-ons