This Week in Badgers: Illinois Recruiting and Anonymous Sourcing
Since Luke Fickell has taken over the program there have been lots of real changes - a new offensive philosophy would be classified as a big one, as well as some cosmetic changes - they tweet more! Then there are changes that blur the line between real and cosmetic. One I have been thinking way too much about is recruiting messaging, specifically planting a recruiting flag in Illinois.
Wisconsin coaches prioritizing in-state recruiting is a prerequisite and Fickell has been checking that box. (Though it was humorous that he lamented how he needed to overcome not having any coaches from Wisconsin on staff as if that was something out of his control). Anyways they’ve made it a big thing on Twitter and billboards about their plans to recruit the Chicago area heavily and giving fans dreams of a “Chicago pipeline” of guys coming to Wisconsin.
We’ll debate the merits of that public strategy in a moment, first want to look back at Wisconsin’s history focusing on certain areas or the country outside of Wisconsin and how it turned out.
We’ll start with Dave McClain who had a bit of a pipeline going in Georgia. Pre-Internet recruiting obviously relied on networking and word of mouth a lot more than today, so made a ton of sense for coaches to have a specific area to target as it just wasn’t practical to be everywhere. McClain grabbed 10 guys in Georgia between 1981 and 1985. Gary Ellerson, Larry Emery and Nate Odomes were a few names that jumped out to this Geriatric Millennial.
McClain also hit Illinois really hard, averaging over 5 guys per class from 81-85. Richard Johnson, Mike Howard, Joe Armentrout and Craig Hudson were a few guys that jumped out at me, I’m sure I’m missing a few other notables but 50 people are going to be reading this and my research is only going to be so thorough.
We don’t have a big sample with Don Morton but he kept McClain’s Georgia pipeline going, specifically going to Carver HS in Columbus, getting 5 guys from that school alone. Again without knowing details, it seems like he outsourced recruiting to the HS coach at Carver and this maybe was not the best strategy, thankfully we never found out.
Moving on to Barry Alvarez, he hit the east coast pretty hard, getting 31 guys from NY/NJ between 1990 and 2005. Some notables: Garrett Graham, PJ Hill, Jonathan Casillas, Chris Pressley, Matt Bernstein, Anthony Davis, Roger Knight, Kenny Gales, Lee Deramus, Eric Unverzagt, Ron Dayne. Pretty good!
Missouri wasn’t consistent (11 guys in 16 years) but an incredible batting average for when they did recruit there – Jamal Cooper, Brandon Williams, Scott Starks, Wendell Bryan, Jamar Fletcher, Terrell Fletcher are the headliners.
These are kind of fun Badger history stuff to look back on (and thus, my interest!) but obviously don’t have a lot to do with the present. The internet existed before Bielema took over but by 2006 it was ubiquitous and changed how college recruiting worked. While forging relationships with High School coaches and local contacts will always be important, the days where a college coach only hears about a kid because he’s friendly with the local high school coach were largely gone. Every recruit has some video on them and the internet allowed every school to recruit nationally. With that in the background, what coaches in the last 20 years have decided to focus on interests me more.
Bret Bielema basically planted his recruiting flag in two places - Florida and Ohio. Ohio really got going with Joe Rudolph on staff. They pulled 19 guys between 2006-2011, not a lot of star power outside of Chris Borland though Bill Nagy, Pat Muldoon and Jeff Duckworth all contributed.
Bielema also pulled 21 guys from Florida, a bunch of recognizable names I won’t go over here but I think overall you would say it was at minimum a mild success.
We don’t have a huge sample of Gary Andersen recruiting data but he, like Fickell was more public in his recruiting strategy, at one point saying he wanted at least 5 Florida kids in every class to develop a pipeline there. He did pull 8 guys over two classes including D’Cota Dixon, Derrick Tindal and Natrell Jamerson, so it wasn’t just lip service. It would have been interesting to see this approach play out with more time.
Of course Paul Chryst wasn’t going to tell you about his recruiting plans so we’re left guessing but he out of any recent coach had a much more “National Approach.” We can look to some mini-trends - they hit Michigan pretty hard with 11 guys including Jordan Turner, Logan Brown, Reggie Pearson and Scott Nelson, but he mostly eschewed particular regions over casting a large net.
Hard to make any judgments on that and I don’t care to litigate the Chryst era here, just will be an interesting contrast to what Fickell has said publicly about his recruiting plans. A real time comparison!
That brings us to focusing on Chicago and planting the flag there, saying you’re going to be strong in the area and putting time and financial resources towards that goal.
Some advantages to it:
Chicago is close to Wisconsin, breaking news I know. Easy for coaches to see players in person, easy for players to visit Wisconsin on game days.
There’s talent there. Again breaking news but compared with other drivable metro areas, it is a place that will always put out Power 5 level recruits.
Some disadvantages
Chicago is close to a lot of other Power 5 schools. It’s 90 minutes to South Bend, 4 hours to Ann Arbor and 5 hours to Columbus. Not to mention Champaign, East Lansing and Iowa City within driving distance.
The amount of top-end talent varies. In the past 4 years the state has averaged four players with .90+ ratings on 247 per year. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not Ohio or Pennsylvania levels.
That all said, with the advantage of this strategy being a blank slate, I like it! It works for a couple reasons - Chicago is close enough that they can pull the occasional 4 or maybe 5 star player. You can hit Ohio or Florida as hard as you want, you’re just not pulling a .95 rated guy who has offers from schools that are much closer. That could, maybe, hopefully happen in Illinois. Getting Grant Stec, the 4th best recruit from the state this early in the cycle is certainly notable.
It also gives them a pipeline of “Plan B” type guys. I think one negative thing you can say about Chryst’s recruiting was after his Plan A guys were off the board it felt (to a dumb outsider like me) they were sort of scrambling to fill spots. We saw that a lot especially at RB, QB and DB.
In-state recruiting is always great because it’s just “less work” for Plan B type guys. If the top OL target picks somewhere else, having a few guys in-state that have visited and have an existing relationship with staff just makes things easier. If they can extend that network to include Chicago it gives them so many more guys to possibly pull from when the top target goes elsewhere.
Lastly, planting a flag in Chicago doesn’t prevent them from recruiting hard elsewhere. It certainly doesn’t feel like Morton hoping Carver puts out some good players. From what we’ve seen they’ve been putting plenty of effort into recruiting nationally.
The messaging on Chicago recruiting is still somewhat cosmetic but I do see some advantages to it, even if it won’t be an enormous game-changer.
While I got you here….
I’m humbly asking the Athletic to stop using anonymous sources on stuff where we don’t need anonymous sources. For some reason the Chase Wolf article got me a little fired up, as much as an article about the 5th string QB leaving can. My favorite Badger articles from the past few years have been Jesse Temple’s debriefs with recruits who have left the program. You get to hear their side of the story on why they left and it’s almost always super interesting! You know you’re getting one viewpoint of the situation and can decide how much weight you want to put on it.
Using an anonymous source in the Wolf article kind of killed it for me. Obviously this source is Wolf’s parents, if not Wolf himself…so why not just say that? It’s not like the bridge between Wolf and Fickell is less burned because there isn’t a name to it. And knowing if it is Wolf himself, a mad parent or friend matters in how we take these articles.
Congrats to Super Bowl Champion Melvin Gordon
My Twitter take that gets the most people mad at me is that Melvin Gordon is ahead of Joe Thomas in my dumb Badger Player rankings.
While Thomas made the Pro Football HOF this year, Gordon won a Super Bowl. Eat it haters.
I never know how to end these things, that’s it for this one. Maybe I’ll be back in March. Thanks for reading.