This Week in Badgers: Cautious Optimism, (Tori) Deal and Expensive TVs
This Week in Badgers: Season 1, Episode 37
Welcome BACK to This Week in Badgers, the #1 Wisconsin Football Newsletter in the Nation. I apologize to all the Patreon subscribers about the lack of issues of late. A few factors contributed to this, most notably no football news, working from home and the nice weather. I’m also being told I don’t have a Patreon, its been a rough stretch.
The biggest news the past couple weeks is HOLY SHIT WE MIGHT HAVE FOOTBALL?
I spent most of May trying to make peace with the idea we wouldn’t have college football next fall, so seeing legitimate discussions about bringing football back has me excited. The last 3 months have showed nothing is for certain, the world can change quickly and the landscape could look completely different by fall, but at the very least there is some optimism that games may be played. Lucas is even doing his 100 days countdown while explaining what a question mark means. I’ll take it!
With my emotional hedging out of the way, let’s get to TWIB.
Recruiting Never Sleeps
Welcome Jack Pugh, a 4 Star TE from the Columbus suburb Hilliard, OH. Pugh did not have a Ohio State offer which certainly helped out the Badgers, but was offered by pretty much everyone else in the conference. Nice recruiting win for the good guys.
Tight End seems like a position the Badgers might be able recruit better than they have been. You can get to the NFL from any school, but unlike many schools Wisconsin actually uses a TE on almost every play, sometimes multiple ones! Seems like a good selling point.
Since Lance Kendricks left they’ve certainly had some good players at that spot, just no stars and not a ton of depth. Feel like they let Iowa take over the “Tight End U” role that is meaningless but something I’m thinking about anyways. Maybe a 2020 Ferguson breakout transitioned into the Cundiff/Rucci/Large/Pugh era is what gets them back on track at the position.
Pugh is a top 10 recruit in the state of Ohio which would make him the 2nd highest ranked player Wisconsin has ever pulled out of the state, behind only Danny Davis (#8).
More to come?
Just so this Newsletter is not out of date the day its sent, there does seem to be some chatter of some possible upcoming commits:
Darryl Peterson, DE/OLB from Ohio (rated .87 on 247)
TJ Bollers, OLB from Iowa (.94)
Nolan Rucci, OL from Pennsylvania (.99)
Obviously any of these would be fantastic. Rucci would join Logan Brown and Josh Ogelsby as the top rated recruits in Badger history and I'm just sorta excited about it because its an OL. Spoiled.
I’ve updated my Recruiting Map with all the new guys in case you need something to waste time looking at.
Another random observation I don’t know where else to put: Iowa goes about 20 deep in FBS recruits in 2021. Sort of crazy for that state.
Recruiting, Where We At?
Jake at AllBadgers (or is it All Badgers, the mind wonders) had a good run down on the current recruiting rankings. The Badgers are 8th in the Big Ten, but as he correctly notes that’s mostly due to having fewer recruits (11) than many teams. The Badgers are am impressive 3rd behind Ohio State and Michigan when you look at average ranking by player.
Would assume as they start to fill out the class the average star rankings drop a little bit but the added guys make the ranking go up and they’ll finish around 5th like they did last year. This has been your recruiting ranking analysis.
Looking at the current Scholarship Distribution, the Badgers have 16 Seniors and 11 committed guys for 2021. They usually seem to take about 5 or 6 guys over the departing Senior number, so would suggest about 10-11 spots left for 2021 guys. I’m not sure what they’ll prioritize, but WR, DT and DB would seem to be logical spots to fill.
Other Links:
Jesse on Hunter Wohler was good. Lots of mentions by Wohler about wanting to stay close to home, reaffirming my belief that 90% of recruiting work is done by the campus location.
Jake had a good Max Lofy profile that I enjoyed. He’s an incoming recruit you don’t hear much about.
UW is pretty quiet about the South End Zone project saying no plans have changed, which makes sense but also wouldn’t surprise me if it got cut whenever they redo the budget.
Breaking News: 80,000 people at a football game brings in a lot of money.
I’m obviously here for homemade weight lifting videos
Nebraska having to preemptively clarify that a reduced capacity sell out still adds to a sell out streak that absolutely zero non-Nebraska fans even remotely care about is amazing and sad.
Every 2022 Recruit seems to be getting National offers. I’m about a year or so away from caring too much about those guys outside of wanting them all to be Badgers.
Other things I care less about: APR standings and Big Ten Media days
Is Big Ten Media days going away forever? Even before COVID it seemed like a very antiquated thing from the pre-internet days.
That’s about all I got? There’s been good recruiting stuff by the Rivals, B5Q, AllBadgers and the 247 guys, but everything outside of that is COVID related, old team/player rankings and I’m sorta sick of talking about all of it.
Roster Turnover
One expected, one surprising.
The surprising one was Blake Wilcox, a Kicker/Punter who many thought would challenge for a spot this fall. On the surface a pretty baffling move, especially for late-May.
Jaypo had an interview with him and this was the big takeaway:
Wilcox acknowledged he took a leave of absence from the football program shortly after the beginning of winter workouts in January. He estimated he was gone for about three weeks but added he tried to keep the staff aware of how he was doing.
Fair or not, the coaching staff’s tolerance for “distraction,” whether its missing conditioning, classes, or getting in a bar fight is directly proportionate to the offending player’s importance to the team. A walk-on punter isn’t going to get much leeway there.
I know you're thinking, "wow a useful article by Jaypo, has he turned the corner?" The answer is of course no.
The expected one was brought to us by Rich creeping on Cade Green’s profile and breaking the news that he is out (would it be that hard for UW to put out a weekly/monthly/whatever press release letting us know when players leave the team? They will confirm it when asked by reporters and it gets out eventually, I don't know why this has to be a state secret). Anyways Green didn’t see the field at all in 3 years with the Badgers so not too surprising to see this news. Seemed like he had injuries but it's another recruiting miss at the WR position.
WR recruiting has been an enigma at Wisconsin, which really shouldn’t be that surprising. Like DBs, it's a position they primarily have to pull from out of state and while the Wisconsin identity as a run heavy, bruising team works great for OL and RB recruiting, its expectedly a tougher sell for WRs. In the modern era of recruiting rankings (post-2000) they've only had four 4 Star recruits (Appleton, Danny Davis, Toon, AJ Taylor) and zero 5 star guys.
The turnover and flame out rate is pretty high with the scholarship guys as well. Cade Green joins a long list of guys that never really got going during their time at WR.
Quick tour of WR recruiting since 2010:
Never got started
Frederick Willis
Andrew James
Cade Green
Natrell Jamerson (good position change for all involved, obviously)
Couldn’t crack the rotation, stuck it out as a special teamer or transferred
Chase Hammond
Isaiah Williams
Manessah Garner
AJ Jordan
Reggie Love
George Rushing
Krenwick Sanders
Good Special Teams guys but minimal WR impact
Kenzel Doe
Aron Cruickshank
Jordan Fredrick (he doesn’t fit any of these categories so going here)
Not writing off...yet, but 2020 is key
Emmett Perry
AJ Abbott
Taj Mustapha
Ok to Solid Starters
Jazz Peavy
Rob Wheelwright
Kendric Pryor
AJ Taylor
Danny Davis
Stars
Quintez Cephus
So that’s 23 guys which netted them 6 productive starters and one guy I’d really consider a game changer in Cephus. The Badgers obviously get by without relying a ton on the WRs and they’ve gotten a ton of help from walk-ons at this position, but still, those numbers are sort of crazy.
The low batting average on scholarship WRs bridges 3 different head coaches and staffs, it's not as simple as blaming Bielema, Andersen or Chryst/Gilmore for guys not developing. Though that doesn't stop me from irrationally hating Chris Beatty.
Hell it goes back longer than that! The 1990s brought us some great recruits like Hayes, Touchdown Tony, Evans and Chambers, but also guys like Arichie Seale, Willie Austin, Rasheed Golden, Roosevelt Williams, Controy White, Devery Hughes, Bryon Brown and many more.
I’m very curious to see how Alvis Whitted impacts this group, he's got a good mix of players to work with. Pryor and Davis have been solid but you feel like there’s a next step for them to take. Abbott, Perry and Mustapha have been stuck on the sidelines while walk-ons like Jack Dunn and Krumolz have gotten rotation reps. Stephan Bracey and Chimere Dike are young guys who have been getting a lot of media hype. Its not a bare cabinet by any means, but there’s a lot of work to be done, especially for 2021 after Pryor and Davis leave.
The Lucas Tweet I’m Still Hung Up On
If you follow me on Twitter, first of all I’m sorry, and I’m especially sorry for the rehash below. I’m still thinking about it daily.
My favorite guilty pleasure is MTV’s The Challenge, which is basically a 4 month long reality show with a different game every week, a “challenge” if you will. I was a Real World fan growing up and as those shows got worse and faded away from public consciousness, this was the next step.
I realize this is anything but cool (read a book loser!) and I’m OK with that.
This leads me to the Lucas Tweet
Its a typical Lucas tweet, but as a Challenge aficionado I was drawn to the (Tori) Deal part of this Tweet. I obviously know Tori Deal from her emergence on The Challenge. She went from unknown rookie in the Dirty 30 season to mainstay on the show. Anyways. I completely dismissed it and spent the day googling and trying to find out what he was talking about. Finally I found a song called Love is Cruel, by none other than Tori freaking Deal from The Challenge.
Possible explanations on how this ended up in a Lucas Tweet.
He watches The Challenge and is invested enough to follow their careers off the show
On his own he discovered this song
He Googled...something?
I want to dismiss #1. Its far fetched, but I can see him watching the show. However watching and following their careers off the show? That’s something even I don’t do, and I’m insane. I just do not see this.
I don’t think #2 is possible. The song has a modest 48,000 plays on Spotify, so this wasn’t showing up in a Daily Mix or suggested to him there. I also don’t see anyone in Lucas’ social circle recommending a terrible electro pop song by two MTV reality show people to him. There’s also no radio play for this song.
This leads to #3 which means he googled something and I’m DYING to know what it was. Did he start with the Love is Cruel thing and make a play on the word Deal? Or did he know he wanted to use the word Deal in the tweet and work backwards from there? Everything in the Tweet flows together except the last sentence, its driving me insane!
Mike - if you’re reading you have an open space in this Newsletter for anything you want. Let’s talk about The Challenge, or we can at the very least go into the crafting of that Tweet.
Let's Remember Some Guys
Nick “Catch a BB in the Dark” Davis was a WR/Special Teams star from 1998-2001. For those too young to get the above reference, before the 1998 season Barry asked him if he could catch a punt, he got that reply, and every broadcast for the next 4 years mentioned it.
His 85 yard Punt Return TD broke open the Rose Bowl clinching win against a good Penn State team and I’d put it somewhere in the discussion as one of the most important Camp Randall plays of all time. He finished his career with 5 return touchdowns and one of the most prolific return men in school history.
I remember thinking/hearing that they wanted to get him involved more in the offense but he was never going to be more than a 3rd WR and the game plan wasn’t especially diversified those years. He still ended up with 1,097 yards receiving which would put him 25th in school history but for some reason is not included in the last Badger media guide.
I know you’re wondering, is Andy going to make this a thing and Tweet at UW people until they respond? Yes, yes he is. #FreeNickDavis.
Of course any Nick Davis remembering wouldn’t be worth anything without mentioning his notable off-field activities. He was suspended 3 games for his Shoe Box involvement and missed the 2000 Sun Bowl for stealing a 38” TV that cost $4,000 from Best Buy. That's not hyperbole, it was actually a 38" TV that cost $4,000. Ah, those were the days.
Nick Davis, remembered.
We will let Nick Davis' TV conclude this week’s Newsletter. I’m sure I forgot something that happened in the 6 weeks since the last issue but so it goes. I’m feeling a little more motivated with the recent optimism for a 2020 season so hopefully won’t wait as long for the next one.
As always feel free to send comments my way, either replying to this or on Twitter. Go Badgers.