Senior cornerback Whigham transforms offseason lifestyle to improve play on field for Syracuse

Julian Whigham received a text message from defensive coordinator Chuck Bullough at 5:30 a.m. similar to others he received throughout the summer.

“It’s your ball,” the text read.

Whigham doesn’t respond with a message of his own, but instead heeds Bullough’s advice on the practice field.

“It just kind of gets your mind right when you get up out of bed,” Whigham said.

Whigham’s all about football from the moment he wakes up, and the texts justify his overhauled lifestyle this offseason. Everything he’s done has been to change what happened last season and Bullough’s texts serve as the reminder: Last year, it wasn’t his ball.

Whigham structured his routines off the field in order to regain his confidence on it. How Whigham, a cornerback, matches up against the conference’s best receivers will determine if it paid off.

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“My focus was that much more intense knowing this is my last go-round being a senior,” Whigham said.

Last season, Whigham wasn’t physical enough. He was inconsistent with his stance at the line of scrimmage and failed to make enough plays on the ball. Receivers attacked the ball with more power and got to it first.

“When there’s no consistency, you end up with games that I had,” Whigham said.

By the end of the year, his confidence was shot and he felt like he let the team down.

 “‘Man, I really need to get my mind right,’” wide receiver Steve Ishmael recalled Whigham telling him at the end of the season.

He hid his PlayStation in his closet and stopped watching TV. Whigham hit the weight room instead of sleeping in on Saturday mornings. He put Netflix aside to go to the practice field and work on his technique.

“It kind of clicked once the season ended like I need to do more,” Whigham said. “… I finally focused up, put it together and I’ve come out an entirely different person.”

Whigham added 15 pounds of muscle, and when he went home to Florida in May and saw his close friend Bobby Puyol for the first time since Winter Break, Puyol said, “Dang Julian, you’ve gotten so much bigger!”

Part of the issue for Whigham was becoming comfortable with the shadow technique, a type of stance he said Syracuse head coach Scott Shafer implemented in the spring of his sophomore year.

Whigham spent his junior season trying to figure out what was most comfortable for him — feet spread wide or narrow, hips lifted high or knees bent low. It all contributed to the season Whigham had.

But he’s decided the stance he will use this upcoming season and said he’s perfectly comfortable with it.

Off the field, Whigham completely altered his eating habits. He cut down visits to his favorite restaurants: The Cheesecake Factory and Five Guys Burgers and Fries. He learned how to cook a few meals in his apartment so he didn’t have to go out. Whigham substituted the 20-piece Chicken McNugget meal for a bowl of homemade pasta.

In the past couple years, Whigham’s mother, Wanda, talked to him about cutting down on fatty foods. Whigham’s attitude was that he would just burn off the calories when he worked out, but now with his back against the wall, he conceded his favorite delicacies.

“It stresses his mom out when she looks at his Twitter and sees pictures of a Cheesecake Factory bag,” Wanda Whigham said of her son’s previous eating habits. “Or I see him tweet out that he’s happily going to Five Guys for burgers because that’s not healthy weight.”

Despite all the adjustments Whigham made, Shafer didn’t guarantee him a starting spot at Atlantic Coast Conference Media Day in July. It was another effort to eliminate his complacency and Whigham said it was the best thing Shafer could have done for him.

“Last year, it was just kind of handed to me,” Whigham said, “and I just kind of sat around, did what I had to do and I didn’t get as good as I could have been last fall.”

Whigham still had an occasional lingering thought about 2014 during the spring and summer, but at the start of training camp, he washed them out. He changed his routines in order to help put it behind him.

Syracuse has an annual tradition to kick off training camp called “Burn The Shoe,” in which players toss shoes into a fire pit and seniors give speeches to teammates. Whigham offered advice about “the little things,” since that’s what Whigham focused on himself entering the season.

“I made sure that when I threw those shoes in there, everything from last year was gone,” Whigham said.

Now Whigham has just one season left to prove it. He’s done everything he says he could in order to make Bullough’s texts ring true.

“The ball is mine,” Whigham says before pausing, preparing to finish his sentence like he hopes to do with pass breakups.

“At all times.”