Working his way back from funk, Stave starting and winning again
MADISON, Wis. -- At his lowest moment, when the one skill he performed better than anybody had inexplicably abandoned him and jumbled his mind, Joel Stave stood alone inside Wisconsin's football practice facility.
It was a Sunday morning in early September, and all that surrounded Stave was a giant bag of footballs by his feet and four target dummies lining a wall near the entrance to the field. Weeks earlier, he had lost his ability to throw passes at teammates with any consistency, developing a mental block that would become a national story. Who'd ever heard of a healthy two-year starting quarterback that missed receivers by 10 yards for no apparent reason, as balls dove into the turf or sailed out of bounds?
Stave certainly hadn't.
"Everyone's kind of like, 'What's going on with Joel?'" he says. "Including myself, no one really knew what was going on with me."
To fix the problem, Stave spent even more time throwing footballs than ever before. He played catch with receiver and good friend Jordan Fredrick after practice. He lobbed passes to buddies inside Camp Randall Stadium after games. And he came to the McClain Center in solitude, trying to stop overthinking a simple process he learned so many years ago.
"Just relax and throw the ball," Stave told himself. "Because I knew I could do it. I wasn't hurt. I wasn't anything. I just was in a funk, I guess. It was just a matter of staying patient, continuing to trust myself and I guess waiting it out."
So Stave stood near the front of one end zone, about 15 yards from his targets. He dropped three steps out of a pretend shotgun formation to simulate a deep stick to a tight end and let fly. Thump. He'd move five steps back, then seven steps, rolling out to each side and ripping a spiral into the target. Thump. Thump. Thump.
If Stave could do this repeatedly inside with nobody watching, he asked himself, why couldn't he replicate those habits in practice or games? And in that moment, he convinced himself that, if he simply maintained faith and continued working, he would return to being the player he once was.
Others inside the football program, in their own moments of reflection, weren't so sure.
"I thought he was Steve Sax," Wisconsin wide receivers coach Chris Beatty says. "I was concerned. Chuck Knoblauch, Mackey Sasser and a lot of those baseball players, they never got better and it ruined their career. It was scary. You're sitting back and you're looking at the guy that is your best passer on the team and you're worried if he's going to be able to make it back."
When Stave arrived for fall camp in early August, he was a confident man that had won 13 of his 19 college starts at quarterback. He was coming off a sophomore season in which he threw 22 touchdown passes -- more than any quarterback in program history outside of Russell Wilson. He ranked fourth all-time in completion percentage and passing efficiency and had played well in important moments of big games.
In most programs, Stave's job would be his to keep until he graduated.
"I think everyone on the front five and pretty much everyone on offense knew that Joel's proven," Badgers right tackle Rob Havenstein says. "Everyone that knows Joel is going to know how he works, how his work ethic is."
Yet here he was, locked in a quarterback competition with Tanner McEvoy because Wisconsin's second-year coaching staff wanted a more mobile player at the position. No, Stave wasn't as fast or agile as McEvoy running out of the pocket. But he damn well knew how to throw a football, and he continued to demonstrate that skill during fall camp, when it appeared he'd gained an edge on McEvoy for the starting job.
Stave also kept tabs on the competition and figured he had positioned himself well for the season.
"I didn't think there was any way that I could not at least play some," Stave says. "I thought with the camp that I had, I wouldn't just be beat out."
But when the coaches made a decision the week before Wisconsin's season opener against LSU, Stave learned he was not the starter. Based on conversations with coaches, he had, in fact, been beaten out entirely. And he was stunned and shaken.
What followed was a deep dive that sent Stave from backup quarterback to temporarily off the playing roster. It began eight days before the opener, on a Friday inside the McClain Center. The weather was hot and humid, and Stave noticed he could not grip the football, which led to passes slipping out of his hands.
Maybe, in retrospect, the knowledge of Stave's demotion burrowed its way inside his head and began to subconsciously affect him. He'll never know the answer. All he knew was, on that day, he lost something he could not understand.
"I was just dripping sweat," Stave says. "When you've got sweat down your forearm and it gets all over your pinkie on the right side of your hand, at least for how I throw it, I couldn't hold onto it anymore. That was the first day where I really started losing control of the ball. And that was because my hand was so wet.
"But I think maybe just thinking about that the next day may have carried over, and things just kind of started to snowball from there."
The long road to recovery was about to begin.
September 6. Camp Randall Stadium. One week earlier, Stave's warmup throws before the LSU game had been so dreadful that fans wondered if he was injured. Badgers coach Gary Andersen, in an effort to protect Stave, would issue a press release a few days later noting Stave had sustained an injury to his throwing shoulder. But Stave ultimately revealed to reporters that night the real reason for his demotion.
His arm was fine. His mind was not.
As Wisconsin prepared for its home opener against Western Illinois, Stave was not even among the top three quarterbacks on the roster. So, he merely stood on the field watching McEvoy, Bart Houston and D.J. Gillins throw passes to teammates.
In Wisconsin's last game there one season before, Stave had thrown for a career-high 339 yards with three touchdowns against Penn State, nearly leading a last-minute comeback. Now, he wasn't even sound enough to throw warmup passes.
There was little anyone could tell Stave to make him feel better in that moment. Instead, several offensive players walked one-by-one up to Stave before leaving the field to close warmups.
They gave him a hug.
"Guys on the team were always really supportive," Stave says. "They always kind of had my back and just kept me positive, I guess. Kept saying, 'Hey, we believe in you. You'll be all right. You'll be fine.' And I knew I would be. So it was just a matter of time."
Football is a brotherhood, with more than 100 players on a Division I program from across the country working toward a common goal. Perhaps sometimes those words become overstated, but in times of need, teammates are there for each other. And this was one of those moments.
Throughout Stave's bout with confidence issues, teammates tried to lift his spirits by reminding him of the Stave they knew, of the player he could still become.
"I think everyone needs their space in certain ways," Havenstein says. "If he ever needed us to come talk to him, we all told him we're there for you. It's not like he was gone, physically away from us or anything like that. Whatever Joel needed at that time, we were going to give."
Badgers players and coaches provided enough support that Stave could feel comfortable moving down to the scout team during practice. That way, he could throw passes to moving targets without the same consequences for making a mistake.
After the Western Illinois game, Stave tried to find the fun in throwing again, playing catch on the field that night with two buddies and his older brother, Bryan. When practices ended, he and Fredrick would remain for more than 30 minutes, tossing the ball back and forth.
"Sometimes it wasn't even routes," Fredrick says. "We'd just run up and down the field throwing. It was more about him not thinking about the technique of things, him just enjoying it. He's the second-best quarterback in the state obviously behind the big boy in Green Bay. That's how we kind of look at it. We'd just have fun."
Wisconsin had its first of two bye weeks following the Western Illinois game. Stave's confidence slowly returned the more throws he made and the less he thought about the process. Two weeks later, on Sept. 20, the sensation of delivering a consistently tight, on-the-money spiral returned while Stave threw warmup passes to teammates before a game against Bowling Green.
As far as Stave was concerned, he was back. Now, all he needed was a chance to prove himself again.
"My family and my friends all stuck with me just saying, 'Hey just be patient,'" Stave says. "I always kind of just had faith that at some point I'd get my shot this year."
October 4. Ryan Field. Fifty-six seconds remaining in the second quarter.
McEvoy had shown through 4 1/2 games he was every bit as good of a running quarterback as coaches hoped. The problem, however, was that he hadn't developed enough as a passer. And after McEvoy threw his fifth interception of the season against Northwestern and led Wisconsin to zero points, Stave finally received the call just before halftime with the Badgers trailing 10-0.
That day certainly won't be recorded as one of Stave's finest few hours. He threw three interceptions and completed less than half his passes in a 20-14 loss during the Big Ten opener. But he also hadn't really played in nine months, and the feeling of being mentally sound enough to compete in the game he loved was freeing. He showed enough touch on his throws to provide coaches with confidence to use him the rest of the season.
One week later, he walked back into Camp Randall Stadium as the starting quarterback for Wisconsin's game against Illinois, with McEvoy being used sparingly in specific run packages as part of a two-quarterback system. And thus began a run that Stave and his team might not have believed in early September.
Seven games. Seven victories. A Big Ten West division championship. And a spot for No. 13 Wisconsin (10-2, 7-1) against No. 5 Ohio State (11-1, 8-0) in the Big Ten championship game this Saturday in Indianapolis.
"It's one of the best stories in college football, in my opinion, the way he fought through such adversity and just kept on battling every single day," Andersen says. "His ability to fight was amazing. That's why he's such a competitor and he'll be so successful in life."
Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon has rightfully earned his share of the credit for the Badgers' turnaround. He is a sure-fire Heisman Trophy finalist that set Big Ten records during eight conference games, rushing for 1,648 yards and 206.0 yards per game in that stretch. His talent has helped to open up the passing game for Stave in small doses.
But players and coaches readily acknowledge Wisconsin would not be in the Big Ten title game without Stave, who has convinced even the most skeptical observers. His mysterious throwing issues are behind him. And neither he nor anybody else on the team has any concerns about them coming back.
"Melvin deserves everything he gets," Beatty says. "The offensive line, they deserve as much as they can get, too. But Joel is our leader. He calms the huddle. He's just one of those guys that is just cool. When things are at their toughest, he's at his best. I definitely think we needed him."
In his seven starts, Stave has completed 60.7 percent of his passes for 928 yards with seven touchdowns, one interception and a 145.3 passer rating. And over his last four games, when Wisconsin has been in the thick of the Big Ten West race, he has completed 48 of 72 passes (66.7 percent) and topped 200 yards passing twice. His game-clinching first-down run against Iowa in the waning minutes of a two-point victory was perhaps the most significant play of the season.
"For him to recover and bounce back the way he did just shows what type of person he is," Gordon says. "He could have easily just packed it in and gave up, tried to transfer or something like that, but he stayed and stuck it out. So that just shows what type of guy he is, what type of character he has."
Stave, for his part, says he never considered calling it quits. Even in the darkest hours when he found himself alone with his thoughts and a bag of footballs, there was always hope.
"I was going through some tough stuff," he says. "But I wasn't just going to bail on the year. You only get four years to play college football. If I bail on one of them, come on."
Instead, Stave is still here. Still fighting. Still throwing. Still starting. And still winning.
"It's been a really good season," Stave says. "It's been really fun just this Big Ten season seeing us get better every week, seeing me personally get better every week. It's been an interesting ride."
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