Surprise Scholarship Stunt Doesn't Go Quite As Smoothly As Planned

Western Michigan surprised walk-on junior RB/special teamer Trevor Sweeney with a scholarship during practice this week. The offer was strapped to a football that Sweeney was supposed to discover during an onside-kick drill. Except:

Sweeney muffed the ball, so

His teammate in better position to recover the ball had to back off a bit, and

Even when Sweeney recovered, he didn’t realize there was anything odd about the ball until he was told to look.

Congratulations to Sweeney, even if the emerging trend of viralizing scholarship offers is cloyingly self-congratulatory coming in a sport whose business model relies on its unilateral insistence that scholarships are sufficient compensation for monetizable labor, while these stunts also manage to serve as reminders that lots of players are working without even that consolation prize.