Bengals rookie Alex Erickson eventually earned All-Big 10 honors at Wisconsin, but he arrived there without a scholarship and didn’t begin practicing with the Badgers until the spring of his freshman year.
“My first semester at school I wasn’t on the team right away,” Alex told me. “I was coming off of a broken wrist so I probably would have had to sit out most of the first season. So in October of my first year in college, a couple of buddies that I played against in high school asked if I would join their intramural team.