LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Davin Wydner is Louisville's backup quarterback.
That's a depth-chart designation, not a career plan.
Ask Wydner about quarterbacks he admires and two names come quickly. He does not choose modestly.
Aaron Rodgers. Josh Allen.
To be fair, Wydner isn't comparing arms. He's comparing roads. Rodgers went through junior college before landing at California. Allen was barely recruited out of high school before eventually making his way to Wyoming.
Wydner likes quarterbacks who got somewhere after people had stopped looking for them.
That may be because he has spent a fair portion of his own career trying to get people to look again.
His road has taken him from Florida Class 4A Player of the Year to walk-on at Ole Miss, through knee surgery, down the college football ladder to West Georgia and now back up to Louisville, where he is competing in a quarterback room headed by Ohio State transfer Lincoln Kienholz.
And if that sounds like an unusual way to pursue an NFL career, Wydner has seen enough college football by now to know there is no usual way.
“I think there's so many paths you can take, right?” Wydner said. “Our room alone has a bunch of different paths.”
Wydner's began in Clinton, New Jersey, where he lived for 13 years before moving to Florida.
At Cocoa High School, he became one of the state's most productive quarterbacks. As a senior, he passed for 3,529 yards and helped Cocoa reach the state championship game. He was rated a 3-star prospect. His recruiting profile showed scholarship offers from Maryland, Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech and others.
There was a catch. By the end of his recruitment, Wydner told Inside the Rebels in 2022, many of those offers had dried up. His choices eventually came down to walk-on opportunities at Rutgers, UCF and Ole Miss.
He chose Ole Miss.
Even then, he wasn't especially interested in where somebody else thought he belonged on a depth chart.
“My confidence is never really going to waver,” Wydner said after committing. “It hasn't really crossed my mind that I'm lower than this guy or lower than that guy.”
Four years later, that sounds less like youthful bravado than a mission statement.
Wydner redshirted in 2022 and spent the season as a scout team quarterback. He didn't play in 2023, either, a season complicated by knee surgery.
For somebody who had spent his childhood playing — football, baseball, basketball, eight varsity letters in all — two college seasons had produced no game snaps.
Eventually, Wydner decided he needed some.
“Originally, I just wanted to play,” he said. “You know, as a kid, all you want to do is play, and I think the older we get, and maybe the current college landscape, maybe that gets lost a little bit.”
So Wydner followed coaches he knew to West Georgia.
It wasn't exactly the usual route toward big-time college football. West Georgia was making the transition from Division II to the FCS. It was, however, a place with a football and a need for somebody to throw it.
Wydner played. Then he played some more.
He started eight games in 2024, throwing nine touchdowns with just a single interception, and added seven rushing touchdowns — the most by a quarterback in the United Athletic Conference that season. A year later, West Georgia went 8-3.
More important than the statistics, Wydner became something he'd never had the opportunity to become at Ole Miss. A college quarterback. Not one on a roster. One responsible for what happened next.
And he learned something. Going down the college football ladder didn't necessarily mean lowering his ceiling. Sometimes it could be the way back up.
“There are a lot of guys in college football right now that do that and make big names,” Wydner said.
He has seen the evidence. Louisville defensive end Clev Lubin traveled from Army to junior college to Coastal Carolina before becoming an All-ACC player at Louisville. College football is full of players now who took a lower-profile route to a bigger stage.
And then there are those two quarterbacks he considers influences.
“I think first one that comes to mind is probably Aaron Rodgers,” Wydner said. “He was a JUCO kid. That's really, really cool just to kind of see.”
Then Allen.
“Zero offers out of high school, not highly touted, never really talked about,” Wydner said. “Those are the two dudes that I think I watch the most personally. But, I mean, just great stories, great perseverance, sticking through things that are hard, and ultimately things worked out.”
Wydner isn't suggesting his career will end like theirs. He is suggesting that beginnings aren't particularly reliable predictors of endings. There are worse places to test that theory than Louisville.
Head coach Jeff Brohm has made a career of finding quarterbacks whose résumés required a little explanation. At Western Kentucky, Brandon Doughty became one of the nation's most prolific passers and an NFL draft pick. Mike White transferred in from South Florida and eventually reached the NFL. At Purdue, Aidan O'Connell went from walk-on to NFL draft pick and eventual starter.
None arrived with a sign around his neck reading FUTURE NFL STARTER.
Which makes offensive coordinator and QB coach Brian Brohm's description of finding Wydner interesting.
After Louisville landed Kienholz from Ohio State, the Cardinals still needed an experienced quarterback for a room that otherwise had largely emptied. Brian Brohm began working through the available quarterbacks in the transfer portal.
Eventually he got to Wydner.
“I thought, from whatever ratings he was rated, lower than I thought he should be,” Brian Brohm said.
Wydner has heard some version of that before.
Brian Brohm saw a 6-foot-5 quarterback who had started games, could throw it and could run it. Wydner said he carried the ball 94 times last season, not counting sacks, after discovering more of that part of his game over his two seasons at West Georgia.
Louisville has even had Wydner and Kienholz spend portions of practice working through drills with the running backs, preparing them for the kinds of cuts and collisions quarterbacks don't experience when they're protected from contact in camp.
Wydner didn't come to Louisville unaware of the competition.
Kienholz arrived from Ohio State and has established himself as the Cardinals' presumed starter. Wydner speaks admiringly of his athletic ability and says the quarterbacks get along well. That doesn't mean he has stopped competing.
“At the end of the day, it's, you know, can I be better than I was yesterday?” Wydner said. “I think if you keep looking at, you know, if the person to the right of me made a better play today, ‘Oh, I have to press. I have to press. I have to go make a big play.’ ... I just try to control what I can control, find the calm amongst all the chaos of football.”
He has had some practice at that, too.
Four years ago, he was a state player of the year walking onto an SEC roster because the scholarship offers he once had weren't there anymore. Two years later, he was recovering from knee surgery and voluntarily leaving the SEC for a program making the jump from Division II.
Now he's back at the Power 4 level. The route makes sense to him.
“I think there's so many paths you can take,” Wydner said.
His certainly qualifies. Along the way, Wydner has learned not to confuse a detour with a destination.
Sometimes, to get where you believe you belong, you have to be willing to go the long way.
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