The mood was bittersweet.

Sean McGushin lined up with 19 other Illinois football seniors ready to take the field, something he had done 28 times before at Memorial Stadium. But this time was different. This time was the last time he would ever don an Illinois uniform and walk onto Zuppke Field as a player — an emotional final game in orange and blue but the beginning of a new chapter in his life.

Sandwiched between four-year starter and NFL hopeful Terry Hawthorne and fellow walk-on Kaeman Mitchell, Sean’s name was announced over the Memorial Stadium loudspeakers, eighth in alphabetical order. The line was moving slowly as the players, clad in their orange jerseys and white pants and touting matte blue Illinois helmets, took photos along the 50-yard line with their families and head coach Tim Beckman.

“No. 13 quarterback Sean McGushin, a community health major from St. Charles, Ill. Sean is accompanied by his parents and heroes Dennis and Maureen McGushin.”

Sean met his parents at midfield, presenting a rose to his mother and posed for photos. They had made it to every home game during his Illini career.

For most of the 41,974 fans in attendance on Nov. 17 to watch the Illini take on Purdue, this was their first time hearing the name Sean McGushin.

In four years as an Illinois quarterback, Sean never played a down of college football.

His photo isn’t splashed across the sports page of local newspapers and his name never appeared in the postgame box scores. His jersey isn’t hanging on displays at campustown shops, and he isn’t recognized while walking to class.

He’s a member of the team, but a spectator all the same.

—

Sean could have played — just not in football. He had several Division I lacrosse scholarship offers to mostly smaller schools, but he opted for a college life of anonymity, giving up a scholarship to Bellarmine University in the process.

At Illinois, Sean hasn’t received one cent. His parents are shouldering the full load of his roughly $10,000 tuition.

Walking away from lacrosse for a spot as a preferred walk-on at Illinois wasn’t easy. Sean was better at lacrosse than football in high school. Not to mention that he left thousands of dollars on the table at Bellarmine. He had years of experience in lacrosse but just eight starts under his belt as a quarterback at St. Charles North High School.

He didn’t realize his talent at quarterback until his senior year of high school when the starter was hurt, and, in his absence, Sean led the team to a 54-0 victory. He remained the starter for the rest of the season, prompting his coaches to suggest that his time on the gridiron might not have to end in high school.

“I wasn’t a big recruit at all, not really even a recruit,” Sean said. “Totally under the radar.”

Over a few late nights, he, his father and a family friend put together a highlight tape and shipped it out to about 15 schools across the country with a letter that acknowledged scholarships weren’t an option but inquired about walk-on opportunities. Sean received encouraging word from a handful of schools — including Indiana, Miami (Ohio), Cincinnati and UNLV — but most were too far away for Sean to give up a sure thing in his lacrosse scholarship to travel out of state for a walk-on spot.

So Sean verbally committed to Bellarmine. But a few months later, Dan Disch, then an Illinois assistant coach on Ron Zook’s staff, emailed him, offering a spot as a preferred walk-on. His spot would be guaranteed as long as he stayed out of trouble. He wouldn’t have to try out and would arrive in the summer just like the scholarship players.

“I felt really guilty when I started contemplating it,” Sean said. The Illinois roster spot intrigued him, but it was still a risky financial decision. It was the most difficult decision of his 18-year life, one that would drastically affect his future and cost his parents plenty.

It took a visit to Champaign-Urbana to seal the deal. Sean and his parents toured the football facility for an hour before showing themselves around the rest of campus, amid the blooming spring weather. Illinois dwarfed Bellarmine, which isn’t much bigger than Sean’s high school at 2,594 full-time students.

“It blew away all the different lacrosse trips that I’ve been on,” Sean said. “Even the best lacrosse schools don’t have what a Big Ten school has for football.”

The state-of-the-art weight room, donated by current New York Giants lineman and former Illini Dave Diehl, the 60,670-capacity stadium, the top-rate education — it all proved too much to pass up.

After the tour, the McGushins were walking north up Wright Street toward Follett’s Bookstore — his father wanted to purchase an Illini T-shirt to commemorate the trip — and Sean’s mother was lagging behind. She was crying.

“I can’t believe that you have an opportunity to be a part of this,” she said through her tears.

“She was just blown away,” Sean said.

—

Sean McGushin’s football field isn’t quite 100 yards.

On Saturdays in the fall, his domain is restricted to 50 yards along Memorial Stadium’s west sideline — a portion of the newly installed FieldTurf Revolution fiber that’s painted orange and stretches between the 25-yard lines, designated for exclusive use of the players, coaches and team personnel.

Sean doesn’t leave the team area when the game clock is ticking. If he did, he’d cost his team a 5-yard sideline interference penalty.

Helmet on, chinstrap unbuckled, he follows the flow of the game as the ball moves up and down the field, wherever gives him the best view of the action. This sometimes means watching the game unfold on the 48-by-68 foot Jumbotron screen that looms above the south endzone. He keeps an eye on the coaches’ signals as they call plays — not to him, but the players on the field.

Sean, a conventional pocket passer with a stocky build at 6-foot-2, 215 pounds, is dressed in full uniform. He wears a QB flak jacket that protects his lower back and ribs but never takes any hits. His No. 13 jersey always stays clean. He spends most of the game stationary, feet planted on the sideline turf.

In practice during the week, Sean isn’t always Sean McGushin. He’s Ohio State’s Braxton Miller, he’s Michigan’s Denard Robinson, he’s Purdue’s Robert Marve.

His role on the team changes as the opponent does, each week impersonating the opposing quarterback for Illinois’ starting defense. One week he could be running Penn State’s pro-style offense and another he could be slinging the ball in Indiana’s up tempo-spread, all while he’s expected to keep up with the Illini’s system.

At the outset of each week, Sean and the rest of the scout team players learn the opponent’s schemes to the best of their ability. They study the film to learn the proper reads and pre-snap tendencies. They mimic everything they can.

“It’s not your offense, but you have to have a feel for it just after a week,” Sean said. “It definitely sometimes has my head spinning a little bit.”

Every so often, he spots the opposing quarterback running a play during a game that he ran earlier in the week with the scout offense.

“He shouldn’t even have been looking over there,” he says to a nearby teammate. “Our safeties rotated. He should have been looking to this side.”

This is Sean’s role on the Illinois football team, and he’s content with it.

—

While the spectacle of Big Ten football lured Sean away from lacrosse to Illinois, he wasn’t without his doubts.

He second-guessed his decision and considered transferring to play lacrosse. He had just finished his first season as an Illini, and he could finish out the fall semester and transfer to Bellarmine in the spring and still make it in time for lacrosse season. He was putting in just as many hours as everyone else on the team, but his chances of seeing the reward of playing time were slim. Nathan Scheelhaase was the heir apparent to Juice Williams — and several other quarterbacks, not to mention the high schoolers yet to arrive — were all ahead of Sean.

Despite the long odds, Sean stuck his nose everywhere, trying to glean whatever he could from coaches and teammates, hoping that maybe, just maybe, he’d crack the lineup. If he worked hard enough, perhaps he could climb the depth chart.

“Not to say I was naive, but I was very hopeful,” Sean said. “I knew obviously Nate was the guy, but I figured, work hard, look good out there, anything is possible.”

But the inevitability of it soon became clear.

“I’m really a little fish in a big pond here. No one at all knows who I am,” Sean remembers thinking. “I could be playing lacrosse somewhere competing for a starting spot in the spring already instead of just kind of waiting and working for no immediate reward.”

But to the small fish, the big pond started to become more appealing. In one of Sean’s freshman year courses, the instructor devoted an entire lecture to Illinois’ history, dubbing it “Red Grange Day.” The Illinois football tradition hit him at that moment.

He wouldn’t leave Illinois with any on-the-field accolades and wouldn’t crack the Illini record books, but Sean decided that didn’t matter. He would be proud to say he walked in the same footsteps of the Illini greats before him — from Red Grange and George Halas to Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke.

“That’s when I realized, you know what, I can’t let this go,” Sean said. “I picked this over lacrosse. I wanted to do this.”

—

Football teams run on players like Sean — the ones who put in the work for little glory. Walk-ons are required to devote just as much time as the starters — a maximum of 20 hours per week, per an NCAA rule that doesn’t include personal training time — but are there on their own dime as small pieces in a larger game.

Of the 104 members of the Illinois football team, 75 got on the field this season. Sixteen of those appeared in fewer than three games, most snagging a few snaps at the end of a blowout loss or the lone dominant victory over Charleston Southern. Their contributions come during the week, on the practice field, running an opponent’s scheme for the starters.

It takes a certain type of realist to be a walk-on, and Sean is a realist.

Sean’s not used to a lack of control, but he has come to terms with his role at Illinois. In all other parts of his life, he is responsible for the results of his actions, such as his schoolwork (he’s been on the dean’s list the last two semesters). Still, the competitor in him never gets used to watching the game unfold. On game days, the team’s fate is out of his hands.

“You just feel helpless,” Sean said, “sitting there knowing that I can’t do anything really.”

He takes solace in his contributions to the scout team; preparing the defense for the opponent each week allows him some influence on the results.

“I think he understands his role might not be out there on Saturday, but he’s helping on Saturday because he’s helping get those guys prepared,” said co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Chris Beatty.

The walk-on role isn’t for everyone. Sean came in as a freshman with eight other walk-ons, but only four stuck with it through senior year — Sean, cornerback Kaeman Mitchell, receiver James Hallendorff and linebacker Beau Sullivan.

“They kind of just kept fizzling out,” Sean said. “It’s a ton of work, obviously. When there’s not the reward of playing or becoming famous, that’s definitely the biggest reason why everyone quits. They want something out of it, and they’re not getting what they expected.”

—

Sean’s Illinois career ended in a loss, a 50-14 loss.

The game against in-state rival Northwestern was out of hand and the other three walk-ons saw some late reps in relief of starters. All the seniors but Sean got on the field.

As the clock was winding down, a graduate assistant turned to Sean: “Have you ever been in a game?”

Sean told him he hadn’t, not thinking there might be a chance. “Our offense didn’t look so good. They’re not gonna send me in there,” he thought.

“I’m gonna say something to Coach Beatty.”

“No, no, no,” Sean replied. Illinois was backed into its own end zone. Second-string quarterback Reilly O’Toole was running the offense from the 5-yard line. Not an ideal situation for a quarterback’s first snap.

“No, I’ll say something,” the graduate assistant insisted. “Just go in and hand the ball off.”

Sean grabbed his helmet, came back and conceded that if O’Toole got the Illini offense out to the 30-yard line, he would let the graduate assistant say something to Beatty. His feet were numb from the cold whipping in from the lakefront in Evanston. He typically requires at least five or six throws to get his arm warm. Starting the game in bad conditions is one thing, but being thrown into the action after idling on the sideline for two hours is another. Handing the ball off, however, was something Sean had done thousands of times before. He could manage that for a play or two.

The next play, O’Toole handed off to running back Dami Ayoola, who was tackled for a 5-yard loss in the endzone — a safety on the final offensive play of the season and of Sean’s career.

“Thank God I was not in there for that,” Sean said. “If that was the one play that I ever had … it would have been awful.”

In the end, it didn’t matter if he saw the field. Sean is content with his role. Although he has another year of eligibility as a redshirt junior, he won’t be returning to the sideline in the fall. He will finish his degree in August and move on to the next chapter in his life. He hopes to go into health administration and sell medical supplies, and he’s already finding that “Illinois quarterback” pops on his resume or resonates in a job interview.

The Illini sputtered in Sean’s final season, but it’s not the 2-10 record or the nine-game losing streak that will stay with him through the years. It’s the friendships and memories that he says will stick. He won’t forget going to back-to-back bowl games or driving along Lakeshore Drive with a police escort en route to play Northwestern at Wrigley Field.

“You can’t pass up running out of that tunnel when the smokes going, the fireworks, hearing the fans go crazy,” he said. “You can’t really get that anywhere else.”

After all, it was the promise of such memories that brought Sean to Illinois in the first place — the chance to be part, even a small part, of the tradition and glory.

Chad can be reached at [email protected] and @cthornburg10.