‘He’s earned this moment’: EWU’s Gunner Talkington bided time as walk-on, ready to make most of senior season

Six years ago, recruiting websites didn’t have much to say about Gunner Talkington.

Listed as a 5-foot-9, 176-pound quarterback, out of five stars – according to the site 247sports.com – Talkington got an “N/A.” No crystal ball prediction. No recruiting visits.

It’s not a page Talkington looks at often, he said.

To others, it doesn’t say much about him at all, anyway. It certainly doesn’t mean much to Larry Peck, who coached him at Battle Ground High School outside Vancouver, Washington.

Talkington had a cannon of an arm in high school, and he was deadly accurate, Peck said.

The “pro style” quarterback – that’s the recruiting profile description – won games, too: Battle Ground went 19-10 with him as a starter from 2014 to 2016. He also threw for 7,905 yards and 77 touchdowns while completing 70% of his passes in an Air Raid-style offense that Peck said Talkington engineered like a field general.

The recruiters came.

“As he threw more, he got more notoriety around the state,” Peck said. “Recruiters would talk to him, but they saw the size and the speed and didn’t think much of it.”

On Saturday at Roos Field against Tennessee State, Talkington will make his second collegiate start in his six years at Eastern Washington. But for the first time, Talkington is doing so as the No. 1 on the depth chart, the undisputed winner of a five-man quarterback battle this offseason to replace one of the greatest Eagles to play the position, Eric Barriere.

Jim Chapin, Eastern’s first-year offensive coordinator, defines himself as a data-driven coach. It helps him to remove the emotional side of assessing players. To Chapin, the data was clear.

“We grade every rep. We chart every throw,” Chapin said. “He was the best.”

Eagles coach Aaron Best has seen how Talkington, who first came to Eastern as a preferred walk-on after graduating from Battle Ground in 2017, has grown from a scout team player of the year to backup quarterback and now, to the team’s starter.

Sitting behind Barriere for so long, Best said, there were times when Talkington didn’t let it rip, times when he could have taken more risks. But he’s done all that this fall, Best said.

“He had a very solid spring, but he’s had a way-above-average fall as far as his communication and his leadership,” Best said. “He’s first in lines. He’s first in meetings. He’s done that for five years. I’m excited for his opportunity to take this and run with it.”

Peck began coaching the Battle Ground football team in 2010, and at the time that team was coming off six straight losing seasons.

But with Talkington as the quarterback, the Tigers became more competitive.

“We were starting all over at that point,” Peck said. “But as soon as he took over as a sophomore, we just moved forward like lightning.”

The Class 4A Greater St. Helens League is a tough one, which includes Camas and Union, programs that have won three of the past five State 4A football titles. That included Camas’ 14-0 season in 2016 when Talkington was a senior. Battle Ground went 7-2 that year, with losses to Camas and Skyview.

“Gunner was just able to take on that load and perform at that level I haven’t seen before,” Peck said. “His stature physically, he’s not a big, tall quarterback. He’s not very mobile. But he is very good at being elusive. He has that innate ability in him.”

With only a couple of partial Division II football offers out of high school, Talkington – who was born in Spokane and still has family in the area – said he opted to go to Eastern as a preferred walk-on. That made sense to Peck, who after the 2016 season stepped away from football but still teaches at nearby Prairie High School.

“He always wanted to go to Eastern. There was no talking him out of it,” Peck said. “That was his baby. And that says something about the grit of the kid.”

It would have been easy for Talkington to rationalize a decision to go to a Division II program and to play earlier, Peck said, but that wasn’t Talkington

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Talkington’s first opportunity to make his mark at Eastern came on the scout team during his redshirt season. Coaches would give him scout cards and his job was to give the starting defense the best look of the opposing offense as they could

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The next season, Talkington got his chance to play some, initially as the team’s holder for kicks. It was something he’d done at Battle Ground.

“When guys come in as a walk-on, you’re just trying to find a way on the field no matter what,” said Talkington, who is still the team’s primary holder on kicks.

He got his first chance to play quarterback that season, too, mopping up in a 55-21 victory over Southern Utah after Barriere had thrown for 233 yards and run for another 98 (plus two touchdowns). Talkington completed 3 of 6 attempts for 35 yards.

Every year since, Talkington backed up Barriere and came in occasionally, mostly in blowouts. In all he completed 32 of 64 passes with two interceptions and five touchdowns.

He also started one game, against Cal Poly in the shortened 2021 spring season. On the game’s third play, he completed a 71-yard pass to Talolo Limu-Jones. Three plays later, he found Freddie Roberson for a 12-yard touchdown, and the rout was on. Barriere took over the next series, and the Eagles won 62-10.

“I had butterflies coming into that game,” Talkington said. “After that first snap, though, you calm down so much. It all goes away.”

All those years backing up Barriere may not have led to many in-game opportunities for Talkington, whose backup now is redshirt freshman Kekoa Visperas.

But that shrouds all the experience in practice and all the time spent studying and preparing for opponents . He’s also no longer a walk-on: He was given a full scholarship at the start of last season, he said.

As a sixth-year player, Talkington is good at managing his emotions and managing situations when variables change, Chapin said.

“He’s an extremely intelligent kid, and that’s a relief for any coach,” Chapin said. “He’s tough and doesn’t get rattled in the moment. He’s even-keeled. When things don’t go according to the plan, he knows how to handle those moments. I think that has to do with his sixth year, but it’s also in his DNA.”

When Talkington spoke with Best earlier this year about coming back for his sixth season, the quarterback made clear that he wanted the opportunity to win the starting job, Best said. If the team was going to go with a younger quarterback, he wanted to know that.

“I feel like I’m competitive in everything I do,” Talkington said, recalling that conversation with his coach.

“I wanted to try and prove that I was good enough to be the starter.”

Now he is, with a chance to follow in the legacy of great Eastern Washington quarterbacks.

“He’s earned this moment to go out and compete,” Chapin said, “and it’s for us to help him go out and be successful.”