Yale RB Tyler Varga Balancing Ivy League Education with NFL Dreams

Going through the NFL draft process, from all-star games and workouts to meetings with teams, requires a busy schedule. Being a pre-med student, especially at an Ivy League university, does too.

Somehow, Yale running back Tyler Varga is doing both simultaneously.

A three-time All-Ivy League selection (first-team in 2012 and 2014, honorable mention in 2013) who participated in this year’s Senior Bowl and was invited to the NFL Scouting Combine, Varga is well within the mix to be a Day 3 selection in this year’s draft. But pursuing his NFL dream has not stopped Varga from continuing his education at Yale, where he is on track to graduate with a degree in ecology and evolutionary biology this spring.

“It’s definitely challenging,” Varga said in an interview with Bleacher Report in early March. “You go to the Senior Bowl, you go to the combine, you talk amongst these guys and 99 percent of them are done with school. They’re focused on training, focused on getting ready for the draft and their testing and all their pro days…I’m training hard, trying to get ready for all that, but I’m at the same time trying to balance all this other stuff.”

That “other stuff” includes spending 10-15 hours per week in medical research labs and finishing up his senior thesis.

“I’m actually doing some insulin-based research: We’re investigating a gene in mice that plays a role in energy efficiency in the body, and hopefully that’ll have human application down the road and help us better understand Type II diabetes,” Varga said. “I’m doing some independent research on the shoulder actually as well, along with taking a couple classes just to tie up my degree.”

Prior to the Senior Bowl in January, he spent a week training at Athletic Edge Sports Performance Conditioning at Bradenton, Florida, and he has returned to Florida to train during Yale’s two-week spring recess.

For the rest of the semester, however, Varga has continued training at Yale. While most other NFL draft prospects have the privilege of working out in posh facilities and warm weather, Yale does not even have an indoor football complex, forcing him to micromanage his schedule during a cold, snowy winter in New Haven, Connecticut.

“There is an indoor bubble that we’ve been training at, I’ve been getting up at 5 a.m. to go and train some days during the week,” Varga said. “It’s a huge puzzle. It’s just a matter of fitting in all the workouts, all the speed training, all the field work and all that stuff into my schedule of classes and other stuff that I’ve got going on at Yale that isn’t as flexible.”

Juggling Yale academics and football, both now and during his collegiate career, has not left Varga much free time.

“If you want to have free time, you want to spend time with your friends, you better be pretty efficient with your schedule, and get your work when you need to get it done and not kind of lollygag around and wander on,” he said. “It’s definitely a challenge, definitely been something that I think will serve me well down the road.”

Varga was one of the first players Tony Reno recruited to New Haven after becoming Yale’s head coach in January of 2012. Reno said that his intangibles—specifically, his work ethic—stood out right away.

“He’s like a lot of guys we have that are very driven, very goal-oriented,” Reno told Bleacher Report. “He sets things out in front of himself and he sets them out with a logical way to accomplish his goals, and he goes and gets them.”

Despite his full plate, Varga has succeeded in all aspects. On the field, he ran for 2,985 yards and 31 touchdowns in his three-year Yale career.

Year	Games	Carries	Yards	Touchdowns
2014	10	233	1423	22
2013	6	125	627	1
2012	8	171	935	8

In the classroom, he carries a 3.56 GPA, according to his bio on Yale’s athletics website.

Varga has even found time to give back to the Yale community. He served on the executive board for the Mandi Schwartz Marrow Donor Registration Drive, which “organizes, promotes and conducts the largest bone marrow drive in the nation each spring,” according to the National Football Foundation.

For his impressive work in each of those aspects, Yale’s Council of Masters honored him with the F. Wilder Bellamy Jr. Memorial Prize, which is given to students “who best exemplify the qualities for which the alumnus is remembered, including personal integrity, loyalty to friends and high-spiritedness in athletics, academics and social life,” according to Yale’s athletics website.

“He’s got an infectious personality,” Reno said of him. “He’s positive in all situations and I think he’s one of those guys who’s able to really deal with any challenge that comes his way.”

Reno also noted that Varga has “been a member of [the Yale football team]’s leadership council since the moment he walked on campus.”

“He’s a vocal leader. He sets a great example,” the head coach said. “Tyler’s a team-first guy as well. I mean, you could have asked Tyler I think at any point in the season how many touchdowns he scored and how many yards he had, and he wouldn’t have had any idea.”

All of those qualities should enhance Varga’s appeal to NFL teams, at least among those who are confident his skills can translate to the next level.

From the Ivy League and from North of the Border

Getting a Division I football scholarship was not easy for Varga, in part because the Swedish-born tailback grew up in Canada.

At Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute in Kitchener, Ontario, Varga was a four-time team MVP who played five positions and scored more than 100 touchdowns. Still, Varga noted that it was tough to get noticed, despite those accolades, because he played his high school football north of the border.

“Being a Canadian player…I think that’s given me a different type of perspective to the game,” Varga said. “If you want to go to college and play football as a Canadian player, it’s getting better now but you really, really have to stand out. You really have to make a big splash. You have to make waves so that people notice you.”

Before transferring to Yale in 2012, Varga played his first year of college football at the University of Western Ontario, where he won the Peter Gorman Trophy as Canada’s national freshman football player of the year.

Now, Varga finds himself in a similar position to where he was in high school. In spite of his three years of excellence at Yale, some NFL teams could discount Varga’s production on the basis that he played against lower-level competition in the Ivy League than prospects who are coming out of Football Bowl Subdivision schools.

Since 2000, only 16 players have been drafted from the Ivy League, and only four from Yale. None of those players were top-100 draft picks, and only eight of those players—just one of the four from Yale—were selected before the seventh round.

Varga, personally, rebuffs the notion that his Ivy League competition was substandard. He believes that hailing from the Ivy League will be an advantage, not a disadvantage, in his transition to the NFL.

“Being an Ivy League student-athlete, I think that makes you even more draftable if you have the physical attributes and you showed you can play the game,” Varga said. “It trains you to be able to handle a lot of stress, a lot of stuff coming at you at once. There’s definitely not a lowered expectation for the athletes at Yale—and I’m sure all the other Ivy Leagues are the same—so you got to really learn how to balance.”

When Varga had a chance to play against prospects from the big schools in the Senior Bowl, he felt that “the level of play was not that much different” from that which he faced in the Ivy League.

“There was maybe a little bit of a difference in competition, but not as much as everyone claims there is,” Varga said. “I mean, we’ve got some great players in the Ivy League as well. We got great competition there as well.”

Varga certainly didn’t look to be in over his head at the Senior Bowl. To the contrary, Varga ran for 13- and seven-yard touchdowns, executed a lead block on a four-yard touchdown from teammate David Cobb and also caught three passes for 39 yards.

Raised to Be an Athlete

Beyond the game itself, another highlight of Varga’s Senior Bowl week came at the weigh-in, where the 5’10”, 227-pound running back’s chiseled physique drew oohs and aahs from the crowd of NFL scouts and media members in attendance.

Walking across a stage in his underwear to have his musculature evaluated might have been a new experience for Varga, but it was certainly not an experience unfamiliar to his family. 

Varga’s parents, John Varga and Hannele Sundberg, were both competitive bodybuilders.

Growing up as the son of competitive athletes—Hannele actually still competes in alpine skiing, and she finished second in her age group of the slalom at the Winter World Masters Games this February—played a “huge role” in Varga achieving his own success in sports.

“They got me into sports at a young age…I was in gymnastics when I was less than a year old,” he said. “Sports has been a huge part of my life, thanks to them, since I’ve been little.”

Seeing what his parents endured in their own athletic endeavors helped ingrain an attention to detail in Varga that he said has served him well.

“Just being able to take a small chunk of that, of the bodybuilding world, and being able to bring that to like another sport, like football, I think has really helped me out,” he said. “Because you look at bodybuilding, you eat like one tablespoon too much salt or something like that, and you could screw up like two months worth of training. I think being able to be that detail-oriented in preparing for what I do on the football field gives me an advantage, so I credit my parents for passing all that down to me.”

Simply being born into a family of athletes helped put Varga on track to become a professional athlete.

“Genetic factor, definitely, I think helped me out a little bit,” he acknowledged.

In spite of that, Varga admitted that playing in the NFL seemed like a long shot when he was a child growing up in Canada.

“The NFL’s always been kind of a dream of mine since I’ve been a little kid,” he said. “Did I see myself playing in the NFL? I don’t think, if you take out the dream factor, probably not. I think it really became a reality probably midway through college…That hasn’t changed my work ethic whatsoever, it’s been there all along, but just that has kind of come up on the road map.”

Now less than two months away from the 2015 NFL draft, Varga is on the verge of making that dream a reality. But there are still obstacles that remain in his path to prove that he can be a successful NFL player.

Where Does Varga Fit on an NFL Offense?

A tailback throughout his career at Yale, Varga also has experienced playing quarterback and returning kickoffs. Some evaluators, however, believe his future in the NFL will require a transition to the fullback position.

Matt Miller, Bleacher Report’s NFL Draft Lead Writer, ranked Varga as the No. 4 fullback and No. 260 overall player on his post-combine big board. NFLDraftScout.com ranks him more favorably, at No. 169 overall, but likewise considers him to be a fullback, and the No. 2 prospect in this year’s draft class at that position.

If the team that drafts Varga or signs him as an undrafted free agent expects him to make that transition, Reno believes he will have to spend time “honing the skills that are required to be a fullback in the NFL,” but ultimately expects his pupil to succeed.

“In my opinion, what makes him so much of a commodity is that he can do both [playing running back or fullback] well,” Reno said. “I think his ability to adapt to different systems—it might be multiple positions—would be something that fits in well for him.”

While Varga feels as though he is most prepared to play as a tailback, he said he is more than willing to make the transition to fullback if asked to do so.

Mary Schwalm/Associated Press

“I’m used to handling the ball a lot, so I’m definitely comfortable in that role. But to be honest with you, I think the position that would make me the happiest is the one that would allow me to help the team in the biggest way,” he said. “I went to the Senior Bowl as a fullback, obviously I have some things to learn but I feel like I’m athletic enough to do both.”

Viewed as a running back, Varga might face questions about his athleticism and explosiveness, but a projected position change brings about its own set of questions, including the idea that he, as NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein noted, is “small for a fullback.”

That suggestion is one that Varga takes exception to.

“The truth is, I never was a fullback, I was asked to play fullback and I more than gladly accepted the challenge and accepted that role at the Senior Bowl, because I just wanted the opportunity to play football,” he said. “But then people say, ‘Oh, well he’s undersized,’ as a fullback…I’ve been a tailback my whole career.

“Obviously if I’m going to play fullback, I’m totally capable of putting on weight if I need to,” he added. “Even despite the fact that they say I was undersized, I still think I held my own against much bigger opponents, 240-pound, 250-pound linebackers.”

One aspect that Varga does feel he needs to work on is that he can be “a little bit overaggressive sometimes.”

“You probably ask how you can be over-physical in football, well, there’s some things in football that require a little bit more of a passive approach,” he said. “Something like pass protection, instead of trying to go knock a head off or trying to knock the guy out, you got to sit back a little bit more. Sometimes I do get a little overaggressive in that type of a situation, and I need to learn how to tone that back a little bit more, and use my hands a little bit more, in some of those situations where you just use body positioning.”

With the exception of the bench press, in which he posted 23 repetitions of 225 pounds, Varga was unable to work out at the NFL Scouting Combine due to a bone spur in his ankle. He says he will be ready to go, however, for his pro day on March 31.

The pro day could be an opportunity for him to prove he is athletic enough to continue playing running back, and/or that he has learned the nuances of playing the fullback position. However, Varga said he is not putting any more pressure on himself to perform at the pro day just because he was unable to work out at the combine.

“I’m just going to go in there and do my best,” he said. “There’s lots on the line, but you just got to go out there and run fast, jump high, be athletic. I think it’s a good opportunity to showcase my ability.”

After the pro day, Varga will have one month to wait—though he certainly won’t sit around idling—before finding out whether he will be selected in this year’s draft, which will be held April 30-May 2 in Chicago.

Getting drafted, Varga told Bleacher Report, would be “a dream come true.”

“Whatever team I go to, it would be something that’s really cool,” he said. “I know it would mean a lot to my school, it would mean a lot to my family, it would mean a lot to my hometown, my high school, everybody who’s been supporting me and watching me growing up.

“Rest assured that if I do get picked up, if I do get drafted, that I’m going to pour everything I’ve got into this opportunity and make the most of it,” he added.

All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Dan Hope is an NFL/NFL Draft Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow @Dan_Hope