Penn State's Rasheed Walker has eyes fixed on becoming the best

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Ask Rasheed Walker about the players he enjoys watching, and he rattles off a list of the NFL’s top offensive tackles: Trent Williams of the 49ers, Ronnie Stanley of the Ravens, Tyron Smith of the Cowboys. Walker is also an admirer of Joe Thomas, who was a 10-time Pro Bowler with the Browns before retiring in 2017, and Brandon Scherff, a three-time Pro Bowl guard who plays for Washington and was an Outland Trophy winner while attending Iowa.

Walker isn’t just a casual observer of the NFL. When he sits down to watch a game, it’s with a purpose, and that purpose is to someday join those players in the league. That means studying the attributes that make them great and seeing what he can incorporate into his game.

“When I’m watching NFL linemen, or even if I’m watching a college football game, I just look at what they’re doing and think about what I would do,” Walker said. “If I’m looking at an NFL player, I’m looking at what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, how they’re doing it, and how effective it is. That’s the type of stuff I look at. For example, Tyron Smith is really good at staying square, staying patient. So I try to look and see how he does it.”

The NFL has been Walker’s dream since he was a kid, and while he still has three seasons of college eligibility remaining, he’s on the right path. The 6-foot-6, 313-pound redshirt sophomore was getting set for his second season as Penn State’s starting left tackle when the Big Ten abandoned its fall football plans. He started all 13 games last fall, including the Cotton Bowl, in which the Nittany Lions pounded Memphis for 396 rushing yards in a 53-39 victory.

Looking back, Walker sees his redshirt freshman season as “a pretty solid year for me.” New offensive line coach Phil Trautwein agrees. Although Trautwein only arrived in January, he watched extensive film from last season and held Zoom meetings with his new players throughout the spring and early summer. It was enough to give him a glimpse of Walker’s potential in the immediate and longterm future..

“He’s athletic, he has great feet, he’s strong, he has a great punch when he uses it. You can tell that he’s nasty and he tries to finish his blocks,” Trautwein said this spring. “I’m excited to get him when he’s young and mold him into what he feels he’s going to be. I know his goals, and I’m going to do everything I can to get him to his goals. He’s a really good player who I’m excited to get my hands on and coach.”

While he was stuck at home this past spring, Walker found ways to maintain his conditioning. He collected as much training gear as he could find – a set of dumbbells, a jump rope, an agility ladder. He bought some 45-pound plates at the beginning of the quarantine but couldn’t find a bar or a rack. The most beneficial part of his exercise routine, he said, was the hill work. There’s an exit near his neighborhood in Waldorf, Md., with a steep incline that he used frequently, and he also worked out in a nearby park. “I ran a lot of hills,” Walker said. “A lot of hills. That was my main leg workout, because I didn’t have anything to squat.”

In early June, he returned to Penn State and got back into the weight training program, albeit in a different form than before. The football staff moved the weights into Holuba Hall to give players more room to spread out. Even though the quarantine had thrown the entire football program out of its customary off-season rhythm, Walker said he didn’t feel like he had to make up for lost time. “The whole time we were at home, I was active,” he said. “I was making sure I was getting at least one workout a day, sometimes two.”

The payoff for all that off-season conditioning will come when he returns to action, depending on whether the Big Ten's plans for a modified "spring" schedule come to fruition. He’s now armed with a full season of starting experience and an understanding that there are still elements of his game that need to be sharpened. Said Walker, “There are always things that I have to clean up. This year, that’s my whole focus, just cleaning up everything I messed up last year, just trying to get one percent better every day.”

Walker said he’s excited to work with Trautwein, in part because the Nittany Lions’ new offensive line coach was in the NFL himself not so long ago. A two-time All-Southeastern Conference lineman at Florida, Trautwein played four pro seasons after landing with the St. Louis Rams in 2009 as an undrafted free agent. He has since helped three players reach the league, including Chris Lindstrom, a first-round pick of the Falcons in 2019. That background has given the former Boston College assistant coach a lot of credibility with his new players.

“He played in the NFL, and he knows that a lot of us have dreams of making it to the NFL,” Walker said. “He made it, so he knows what you’ve got to do to get there. He shares that knowledge with all of us.”

Penn State returns five offensive linemen who made at least five starts in 2019. That list includes a couple of players – center Michal Menet and right tackle Will Fries – who, like Walker, started all 13 games, though their participation in a spring season or even a fall 2021 season is now in doubt. Mike Miranda started eight games, and fellow guard C.J. Thorpe started five. Either Miranda or Thorpe figures to switch to left guard to replace the graduated Steven Gonzalez, which would have given Penn State one of the Big Ten’s more experienced offensive lines going into the next season.

Now, those elements are all unknown.

The last time anyone saw this line in action, it was opening up gaping holes in the Memphis defense for Journey Brown and Noah Cain. While this year’s slate is still up in the air, future Big Ten opponents will assuredly be more physical than the Tigers, but Walker said Penn State’s finale last December sets the team up nicely for what comes next.

“That was a real good game for us,” he said. “I feel like that game kind of woke everybody up. We all saw the potential that we had. We already knew what it was, but it was a matter of us just knowing what we have to do and then doing it to get to where we want to be as an offensive line.”

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