On the morning of November 20, a groggy Joey Slackman woke up from anesthesia sleep. He had just spent three hours in surgery to repair a torn bicep.
That day, Slackman’s name also happened to pop up in the transfer portal, the marketplace where college football players are looking for a new school. Slackman, who graduated from Penn State with a degree in political science, decided to pursue a master’s degree and now coaches can contact him.
“It’s totally surreal,” said Joey’s father, Paul Slackman. “We got there at about 4:30 in the morning. I said goodbye. They got him ready. It just so happened that it was the day he entered the portal. I had completely forgotten about it. We really didn’t know much about the whole process.
Four years ago, Joey arrived at the Ivy League as an unstarred football recruit from Long Island and later went on to wrestle at Penn State. He was never the No. 1 player. But to the surprise of the Slackman family, Joey woke up from surgery one of the hottest commodities on the transfer market.
“I remember waking up feeling very confused and nauseous from the surgery, but I just remember looking at (my father) when I finally regained consciousness,” Joey Slackman said. “He had his cell phone in his hand. He had just gotten out of the car with the coach. He hung up the phone and said, ‘You’re not going to believe what’s happening.’ ” I feel like I’m still down, or I’m in a delirious state.
Slackman was awakened, bandaged and placed in a wheelchair and released two hours later. He was still a little groggy from the effects of the anesthesia, but during the five-hour drive back to Long Island, he began to respond to his trainer.
“On the way back, his phone kept ringing with text messages and calls,” Paul Sleckman said. “I got a lot of calls from coaches. It went on for hours. We probably had seven or eight phone conversations and text messages with 20-25 different people.
“The first 24 hours were really crazy.”
For many transfer portal entries, the recruitment process is a second spin. Most of them were recruited by football programs out of high school.
Slackman joined Penn State as a heavyweight wrestler, ranked No. 12 nationally in his weight class. Paul, an athletic trainer who won a Division III national championship as a tight end at Ithaca (N.Y.) College, entered Joey into a wrestling tournament as a sophomore. His son hates it.
“I remember him saying, ‘I never want to do this again,'” said Slyckman’s mother, Dana.
However, Slackman loved football and playing with his friends. In middle school, he tried wrestling after his football coach told him it would make him a better tight end.
Through a combination of strength, determination, and focus, Slackman emerged as a wrestler. He attended wrestling camps and gained national recognition. He became New York’s top 285-pounder and twice earned All-American honors at the nationals in Fargo, North Dakota.
“He worked out religiously regardless of physical condition, weather or time constraints,” Paul Sleckman said. “He had just had pectoral surgery a few years ago. He was wearing a sling and wanted to keep it in shape. We were on vacation near Sarasota. He had the surgery a week before. He decided to go running in the sling. He walked along It was 8-9 miles down this main road with all these cars honking and waving at him which really showed his determination.
Joey attributes this determination to how his parents raised him and his sister, a fencer at the Air Force Academy.
“In our family, we’re not actually allowed to use the word ‘can’t,'” he said. “It’s like swearing. Things like that shaped my mentality. Growing up, I was never a strong-willed kid. I was chubby. I was lazy. School was easy for me, so I It didn’t take a lot of effort, but wrestling helped me become tougher, I think, and you’re out there in a stupid outfit and you’re on your own and it forces you to make a choice about whether to grow up or not. Figure this out.
Due to a poor showing on his high school football team, Slackman didn’t receive much recognition until his senior season, when he was named first-team all-state. At the time, he thought wrestling was his ticket to higher education. He chose Penn State over recruiting interest from all the Ivy League wrestling programs.
He tore his ACL and meniscus while wrestling as a freshman for the Quakers. Three months later, the pandemic shut down college sports and everyone at Penn State was sent home. Slackman took a gap year away from school while rehabbing a knee injury. He lived in Philadelphia with his wrestling teammates while working for a non-profit organization called Beat the Streets, which was affiliated with the wrestling community and aimed at helping underprivileged children in the area.
“When he was wrestling in the (Penn State) football program at the same time, I remember him saying, ‘I really miss football,'” Dana recalled.
Slackman decided to try out for the Penn State football program and play both sports. He recovered in February 2021 but tore his right pectoral muscle shortly after. That meant another surgery and another six months of recuperation.
“I don’t think (Penn State coaches) thought much of me at first,” he said. “I just had two major surgeries.”
Slackman quickly turned around after putting his pads back on. In his first college game, he had a half-sack. His high school football coach was right. All that wrestling training had a huge impact on his development as a defensive lineman.
“It helped me a lot, especially in the run game and being able to hold my ground because I was able to understand leverage so well and without thinking, I was able to prevent myself from getting moved, which is a lot of what you Gotta be a defensive tackle,” he said. “Learning how to hand-to-hand combat is the most important thing in wrestling, and that’s the most important thing as a D-lineman. Also, a lot of the pass rush moves I like to play are similar to the moves I make in wrestling.
Slackman finished the season with 16 tackles, 3.5 tackles for loss, 2.5 sacks and a forced fumble and decided to focus solely on football midway through the season. In 2022, he started all 10 games and was named to the All-Ivy League team, ranking second on the team with 4.5 sacks and 49 tackles for loss. But in the penultimate defensive game of the season, he tore his left pectoral muscle. The injury, which required his third major surgery, only seemed to push Slackman further.
“He’s one of the most focused, dedicated people I’ve ever met and one of the toughest people I’ve ever met,” said Cornell head coach and former Penn offensive coordinator Dan Swanstrom. Dan Swanstrom said. “He just has a very different personality. He’s the toughest SOB I’ve ever seen.
“He weighed 305 pounds and was about 16-17 percent body fat. He was a physical freak. … We had to take him out so we could practice. He would disrupt our entire offensive practice. He just has that ability. Destructive.
In 2023, Slackman became the most dominant player in the Ivy League. He had five tackles for loss in Penn’s first two games. He finished the season with a team-high 12 TFLs and 50 tackles, becoming the first Penn State player since 2015 to earn Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year honors.
The Quakers were still in contention for the conference title when they faced No. 19 Harvard in their penultimate game of the season. With five minutes left in the fourth quarter, Slyckman tore his right bicep. He took off his pads and tried to support his teammates. Penn trailed 20-13 before tying the score. Before overtime, Slackman asked team doctors if the injury would become more serious if he returned to the game.
“The doctor said, ‘You can’t hurt it anymore,'” Sleckman said. “This was our last chance to keep our Ivy League (championship) hopes alive. I walked up to our coach and said, ‘Let’s go!
The coaches got Slackman back into the game.
“It’s more than that,” Swanstrom said. “We had a goal line stand, like, three games inside the No. 2. He was in all three games with a torn bicep. Talk about putting it all out there.
Slackman said he wasn’t trying to be a hero. He had other things on his mind.
“I really thought this was going to be the end of my football career,” he said.
Yes, playing in the trenches with a torn bicep is extremely painful. After three overtimes, Harvard University won 25-23.
“I guess the adrenaline is still flowing,” he said.
Feedback in NFL circles last fall was that Slackman could be a late-round pick, but that was before he won the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year award. Several NFL teams visited him; four in one year. “That’s when we started to realize, ‘Wow, he can be drafted,'” Paul Slackman said.
But that was before a torn bicep against Harvard made full participation in the draft process impractical. So Slackman, who graduated from Penn State with a degree in political science, submitted paperwork to enter the transfer portal.
“No one was prepared for our transfer portal process,” Dana Slackman said. “It took us by surprise.”
It’s not easy to sort through all the offers and opportunities. Michigan State, Texas A&M, Miami, USC and others came calling. He estimates that about 50 schools offered him opportunities. Eventually, he scheduled trips to Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, North Carolina, Florida State and Auburn.
“This has been the craziest month of my life so far,” Slackman said.
Florida felt like a perfect fit. The Gators feel the same way.
“He’s an alpha personality, very articulate and very smart,” Florida State head coach Billy Napier said. “It’s important to him. He’s very proactive. The biggest compliment I can give him is when he took his official visit here, I literally had 12 to 15 players come up to me and say, ‘Coach, we’ve got to get that person. ” He checked all the boxes.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb/ Competitor; Photo: Andy Lewis, Getty Images; Courtesy of the Slackman family)
