This Week in Badgers: Recruiting!
This Week in Badgers: Season 1, Episode 29
Welcome to This Week in Badgers, where we are BACK after a week off. I spent last week relaxing on a beach while only occasionally thinking about the Badgers blowing the Rose Bowl. It was nice.
This week we’ve got some roster comings and goings, 2020, 2021 and 2022 recruiting updates, I lash out at a Wikipedia editor and end with a look at some Badger recruiting trends.
Usual Stuff
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Saying goodbye
Bradrick Shaw received a 6th year medical hardship waiver and entered the transfer portal. With Jalen Berger committed and the Badgers over their scholarship limit I’m not sure they had a spot available for him. He was one of my personal favorites and appreciated how he stuck at Wisconsin through a terrible injury and reduced playing time. Obviously pulling for him in his next endeavor.
Seth Currens also in the transfer portal. He was a candidate to be Ray Ball’d earlier this year after missing the first 3 games with no explanation, but came back to play on some special team units. For those people who like to guess on off-season turnover he was an obvious candidate.
Griffin Grady entered the portal after leaving the team last summer. Reminds me a bit of Arrington Farrar doing the same after leaving in the previous camp. Doesn’t hurt to see what opportunities are out there.
Saying Hello
Welcome Riley Nowakowski, a 2020 walk-on OLB from Marquette University HS in Milwaukee. If the listed size of 6’4” 230 is accurate it seems like a great frame for the position and he had a bunch of other offers from FBS teams. All in all a pretty good walk-on pickup. Jake at AllBadgers had a good recap on Nowakowski with some quotes.
He joins Marquette University teammate Sean Timmis as a walk-on in the 2020 class. Badgers have had a few guys from Marquette University in the past including Conor Sheehy, the Trotter brothers and 1989 walk-on QB Jeff Jarecki. I bet you didn’t think this Newsletter would have a Jeff Jarecki reference. You thought wrong.
Another welcome to 2020 QB Daniel Wright, also a walk-on. He's a massive guy at 6'7" that I'm sure everyone wants to move to OL already but man, I have to tell you I'm all in on him after watching his Hudl film. In those videos his footwork is terrible, he never really has to move in the pocket and I assume Sioux Falls doesn't exactly face the best HS competition, but he is absolutely slinging it. Evan Flood had a good (free) article on him and his recruitment.
That's a nice walk-on find by Budmayr. The Badgers have rarely gone after any Iowa kids, Andrew Van Ginkel and Michael Roan (who was remembered) are the names you'd recognize.
Who wouldn't want to play football for this man?
Recruiting
Signing Day for 2020 is Wednesday. All seems well on the Jalen Berger front, so hoping no surprises.
Looking ahead to 2021, it seems like the Badgers have the instate guys they want for now and have started to shift their focus outside the state to fill out the class. My Twitter feed is full of Tweets from guys I’ve never heard of getting offers. I don’t have the bandwidth or interest to cover all of them, but the Rivals and 247 people surely have you covered. AllBadgers has been throwing up some summaries as well. Of course I hope they all become Badgers and are awesome players. That's just the sort of guy I am.
My takeaways are that multiple guys are using Graham Mertz on the offer photo Tweet and yes, at least one guy called it Wisconsin University, I love recruiting. They also had a recruit named Kobe King in town for a visit last week, just fantastic timing.
It also seems like 2022 is heating up, especially in-state recruiting which seems to be really strong based on early offers by Wisconsin.
Trio of OL offers include Billy Schrauth from Fond Du Lac, Joe Brunner from Whitefish Bay and Carson Hinzman from Hammond. All these guys have Iowa offers with Hinzman also receiving a Notre Dame offer.
Braelon Allen, a Safety from Fond Du Lac has a Notre Dame and Iowa offer and looks like an early frontrunner for top HS recruit in the state.
Jerry Cross is a 6’6” 220 WR from Milwaukee King who could end up at a few different positions, also has an Iowa St offer.
Closing out the early in-state offers is Sun Prairie DE Isaac Hamm, who also has an offer from, you guessed it, Iowa.
I appreciate Iowa spending a lot of time in the state and offering a bunch of guys who always turn them down if Wisconsin offers. Its a wonder they've only beaten Wisconsin once in the last decade.
Finding the next Graham Mertz
Brady Allen from Indiana is one of two out of state 2022 QBs they’ve offered. His offer sheet of Purdue, Indiana, Va Tech and Cincinnati makes it seem like he is a realistic target for Wisconsin, but of course it's early. He's 6'5", 196 which is tall and pretty lanky, but the Badgers have had success with Sorgian type builds at the position in the past.
The other out of state QB offer is Devin Brown from Arizona. His other early offers include Arizona, Arizona St and Iowa State. Again, seems doable for Wisconsin if he wants to leave his home state.
Other Links
Enjoyed Jake’s article at AllBadgers on 2021 recruit Riley Mahlman. His coach mentions that Mahlman will essentially have to learn to pass block since his HS team is very run heavy. The jump from HS to College football is so huge and requires even the top recruits at the position to learn entirely new skills, something I take for granted when daydreaming about guys coming in and dominating from day one.
Jack Nelson got a 247 ratings bump and is now a 5 star recruit. On one hand I recognize how silly and arbitrary these rankings are, on the other hand, I pay attention to this stuff way more than I’d like to admit.
Paul Chryst: Contract Extended. One of my favorite things are people on Twitter who don’t realize these are routine extensions given out every year, but there didn’t seem to be too many of them on this.
Notre Dame: Night Game. I will complain to anyone who will listen (fewer and fewer by the day) that these neutral site games are a travesty and a night game against Notre Dame at Camp Randall would be incredible, but...I’ll probably go to this so please get at me with your pregame tailgating parties I can crash.
Lots of 2020 depth chart projections out there, but all pretty predictable stuff so far. I want one writer to shoot their shot and really go for it with a fall projection. Give me Mertz at QB, move Stephan Bracey to Safety and start Jalen Berger at RB. Chimere Dike and Jaylan Franklin with the 1s. Let’s make some bold predictions that are almost assuredly wrong but would cause a week of Twitter debate. We need something to get mad about in February that doesn’t involve the basketball program.
Let’s Remember Some Guys
This weeks guy is Mike Echols, CB from 1998-2001. Echols was one of the best cover CBs the school has ever had and a mainstay at the position, starting all of his four years at Wisconsin.
Echols holds the single game, season, and career records for Passes Defended. He also held the single season Pass Breakups record of 19 until Nick Nelson topped it with 21 in 2017. He finished his career 6th in INTs with 12. What’s the difference between Pass Breakups and Pass Defended? Pass Defended is Breakups + INTs. Its weird they have leader boards for both.
Echols also blocked a FG in the 2000 Rose Bowl which is mostly forgotten but a pretty big deal in a game decided by 8 points. He went on to get drafted in the 4th round by the Titans but didn't have much of an NFL career after that, though he did get a Wikipedia page that goes out of its way to bring up every negative thing possible about it. Does a pass interference penalty in the 2004 NFL pre-season really need to be mentioned?
Anyways, Echols was awesome and I'm willing to fight the Wikipedia editor. They know where to find me.
Mike Echols, remembered.
Recruiting - Making Progress?
About a month ago I ranked the best recruiting classes at Wisconsin. One takeaway in doing this exercise was there wasn't one specific time period that stood out. Alvarez, Bielema, Chryst, Andersen and even McClain made the list. Looking at the big picture, recruiting has sort of been the same for Wisconsin for the past 30-ish years.
That’s not to say there haven’t been great classes and some not so great, of course there have been, but generally the classes all follow the same format: a bunch of instate guys, 3 star DBs from warm weather locations, a RB from New Jersey and some other Midwestern guys to fill in the gaps. And this has worked!
Drastically changing a school’s recruiting results doesn’t happen quickly and when it does change quickly it usually ends with that school on probation. That said, there are some signs pointing towards Wisconsin making some progress in a few areas.
When I look at these recruiting trends I really only focus on out of state guys. Locking down the Wisconsin guys is no small feat and shouldn’t be taken for granted, but also doesn’t give us much insight. They’re going to target and go after the best guys they can regardless of position and will almost always get them. Out of state requires convincing guys to leave their home state while forgoing other offers and is a better barometer for how outsiders (recruits, players, teams) view the program.
There has been some progress in a few areas, mainly Offensive Line, OLB and RB.
Yes, they’ve never had a problem finding guys to play Offensive Line but perhaps their rep has finally started to impact recruiting. Logan Brown was the highest rated out of state recruit they’ve ever gotten, and they also added 4 star Joe Tippman (2019) and Riley Mahlman (2021). That’s 3 blue chip, out of state OL in a very short time.
They may not even offer Marcus Mbow from Wauwatosa who already has Nebraska and Purdue offers simply because the pool of OL recruits that would consider Wisconsin is massive. (Somewhat related and a theory I can’t prove, but I think the recruiting ranking services have realized the Badgers are so good at getting and developing OL that every OL commit gets a bit of a ratings boost other positions don’t. They’ve spent two decades looking dumb for low ratings on OL, they just give everyone a high 3 star or better now once they commit).
A second, more recent trend has been OLB recruiting. Jesse Temple had a really good article on Nick Herbig’s recruitment and rationale for choosing Wisconsin. The thing I found most interesting is how honest he was about why he picked Wisconsin. There’s no lip service to academics or any other non-football cliches, he is going to Wisconsin because of their recent success at getting OLBs to the NFL.
The success they’ve had at the position since moving to the 3-4 (Watt, Biegel, Baun, Schobert, Dooley, Jacobs, etc) not only got Herbig, but was no doubt a factor in pulling 4 star Kaden Johnson and flipping Aaron Witt from Iowa (who flipped him from Minnesota). In 2019 they got 4 star Spencer Lytle out of California who had a Clemson offer, among others.
I don’t think its a coincidence that they’re all of a sudden getting guys from all over the country to play at Wisconsin, its been a ticket to the NFL for a lot of players already and obviously has not gone unnoticed by recruits.
The third trend is sort of a wait and see for me, but getting Jalen Berger was a significant “reputation win” in that they beat out a lot of top schools for a RB because a recruit saw Wisconsin as his ticket to the NFL.
I see the “why can’t Wisconsin recruit RB, they should be dying to come to Wisconsin!” thing on Twitter/Message Boards a lot which is of course begging to be explored deeper. The biggest reason is you usually have to recruit the RB from places far away from Wisconsin, and its a position you can get to the NFL regardless of a player’s workload, scheme or competition in college.
Here’s where the top 15, 2020 High School RBs are from: TX (4), FL (3), GA (2), MD (2), CA (1), AL (1), AZ (1), NJ (1, Berger).
You’re going into warm climates and trying to get guys with offers to play at top warm weather schools, that’s TOUGH. Generally when they recruit in the south for other positions, its for guys that don't have those kinds of offers.
RB recruits also know they can get to the NFL from anywhere. The 2019 draft had RBs from Memphis (2 guys!), Iowa State, Florida Atlantic, Boise St, Temple and Pitt all go in the first 5 rounds. You don’t even need to have great college stats, just show up to a combine and run a 4.4 and someone will take you. Can’t always be said for an OL/OLB where physical development is super important and film against top competition matters a lot.
Anyways, back to Berger. an obvious advantage here is that he isn’t from a warm weather location and doesn’t know life without soul crushing winters, but also how Wisconsin has handled Jonathan Taylor -- keeping him healthy and on a reasonable snap counts while expanding his game with pass catching, didn’t go unnoticed by Berger. I hope this trend can continue and think it can.
So that’s 3 spots where where there have been significant improvements and its where Wisconsin can compete with the “big boys” in recruiting.
Now how to do that with DL, DBs and WRs? Man, I don’t know. Those spots that usually require out of state guys and positions where Wisconsin really hasn’t been a pipeline to the NFL. To build that pipeline they’ll need to be fortunate enough to find instate guys and hit on some under recruited talent and develop them, build up a rep and hope it pays off on the recruiting trail. That’s an ask, but hardly anyone 10 years ago would have predicted they’d be pulling in 4 star OLBs on the regular either. It can be done, it will just take some time.
That's it for this week. As always, thanks for reading. Go Badgers.