This Week in Badgers: Transfers, Rudy and Weight Room Videos
Plus Complaining
Welcome to This Week in Badgers where we complain about stuff and look at the Badgers’ history in the transfer market. It’s not as boring as it sounds. Actually, it might be.
News
Joe Rudolph to Notre Dame! Rich asked for my hot take on this and I don’t want to disappoint him so I’ll say that I always liked Rudy as an OL coach and thought he got a lot of unnecessary crap from Badger fans looking to blame someone other than Chryst and Mertz for offensive struggles. He was in a no-win situation as the “offensive coordinator” under Chryst but strictly as an OL coach and recruiter, feels like he’ll be good at Notre Dame.
I’d imagine with his history and connections in Wisconsin together with the Notre Dame business card that instate recruiting for OL could get a little interesting in the near term.
Now on to the complaining.
Things I’m Out On
Can we get rid of reporting offers to recruits? Some are actually committable, some are thrown out to get their attention, some are favors to friends or coaches to boost a player’s profile. They can be actively misleading to ranking services and fan expectations. Above all they’re a waste of my damn time.
I don’t know the solution to this very pressing problem. Report that School X has shown interest. Report players visiting. Let an independent panel decide if the offer is real or not. I’m not sure, but there has to be another way.
Reporting Offers to Recruits, out on.
Thing I’m Out On Part II
I’m good on the weight room videos, “guys of the week”, speed tests and the like. I appreciate what they’re doing and I realize I’m not the target audience, but I’ve seen enough shirtless football players doing tug of war to get me to spring practice.
In the past we’d spend days anticipating the spring roster release to see who has put on weight and now there’s probably a weirdo 247 poster keeping track of this via weight room videos and pictures. Did I make up a person exhibiting more insane Badger fan behavior than myself to justify what I’m doing here? I might have.
Social media in February, out on.
Things I’m In On:
The Maximus Stienecker Media Tour. The guy is everywhere lately. Giving publicity to the guy that gives you a heads up on the recruiting bat signal is a classic quid pro quo move but I like it.
I love that he’s 22 years old and running the ship. Despite what Saeed Khalif might have you believe, the admin recruiting stuff seems like a lot of grunt work - being extremely active on social media, being the first point of contact for anyone with a HUDL profile and the guy who answers DMs. All of which seem perfect for a Gen Z guy.
Also he once sent me a nice DM about a tweet that I didn’t even mention him in. I’m nobody! He’s very online and I love it.
Max Stienecker, in on.
Transfer Types
Outside of the new coaching staff, the dominant talking point this off-season has been the work the Badgers have done in the transfer portal. The new transfer rules and extra covid year eligibility combined with a new coaching staff needing players for a new offense has clearly taken Portaling up a level from what the previous staff had done.
People seem to lump all transfers together which seems overly simplistic to me. It’s easy to compare High School recruits, they’re roughly the same age and go to the same camps. College transfers can be everything from a 19 year old leaving after a year of redshirting to a 24 year old QB coming back for year 6.
With that in mind, wanted to look back at some history the Badgers have had with transfers and slot these guys into different groups, figure out where the incoming group might land and what that might say about future use of the portal.
Group 1: JUCO transfers
Badgers did some decent work here in the 80s and early 90s and were more selective in following years. Looking at the full list I have that is surely incomplete — Donny Brady, Sylas Pratt, Daniel Moore, Serge Trezy and Ken Stills are a few names that jumped out. Someone with more 80s knowledge could probably fill in some gaps I’m missing.
I’ll add Andrew Van Ginkel and Tanner McEvoy who both went to Juco as a second stop so they wouldn’t have to sit out a year, which is a little different than an out of High School JUCO recruit. I assume with the new portal rules we’ve seen the last of this strategy which is probably for the best.
The height of Badger JUCO recruiting was probably in the early 80s with Dave McClain. He seemed to have some inroads with California JUCOs, though this did get him in some NCAA trouble for gifting plane tickets.
You know what, while we’re on the topic of the Badgers running afoul of the NCAA Law in the 80s, the recruitment of Carlton Walker deserves a special shoutout:
He said the violations involved the recruiting last year of Walker, a 290-pound high school All-America from Tampa who was the Badgers' regular offensive right tackle last fall.
A Wisconsin alumnus, representing the university, reportedly 'stashed' Walker in a lodge away from rival recruiters as the deadline neared for high school players to select their colleges by signing national letters of intent.
The alumnus has been reprimanded and told he will no longer represent the university.
The longer story was he took him on a fishing trip for a couple days before Signing Day where he would be away from a phone and thus unable to hear from other coaches. I love this story so much.
Verdict: Some mild success. Brady and Platt were rotation guys on the Rose Bowl team, Van Ginkel and McEvoy were starters on some great defense. But overall it hasn’t given the Badgers much.
I know a lot has been made on the academic issues JUCO athletes face getting into Wisconsin and I won't pretend to have insight there, but combining that possible issue with the fact that there aren’t many JUCOs near Wisconsin, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of Wisconsin HS kids who go to JUCOs, it doesn’t seem surprising it hasn’t been much of a focus by most staffs.
Gary Andersen was of course pretty vocal about his desire to make this more prominent at Wisconsin but I’m pretty skeptical there was enough value here to have made that work.
2023 Players: None
Group 2: Quarterbacks
Quarterbacks transferred before it was mainstream. The Hipster Transfers if you will. Meet Me in the QB Room. The Badgers have brought in a few over the past 40 years, many you’re surely familiar with and if you’re not this newsletter must be weird to read.
To wit: Randy Wright, Darrell Bevell* Allan Evridge, Russell Wilson, Danny O’Brien, Tanner McEvoy
Verdict: Boom or Bust. The ones that hit, REALLY hit but the ones that did not killed seasons and perhaps shortened coaching careers in Madison. Living in Madison, I constantly have people come up to me and say having a guy like Jim Sorgi on the 2012 team instead of Danny O’Brien probably nets Bielema a National Championship.
I guess the lesson here is that it’s fine to rely on a transfer QB but you better be right.
*Darrell Bevell is probably his own category and somewhat reminiscent of Tanner Mordecai’s recruitment. New coach Barry Alvarez, coming in with a defensive coordinator background brought in Brad Childress to be the running back coach in 1991. Childress had been at Northern Arizona a couple years prior and had his star QB leave the team to take a two-year LDS Church mission. Childress getting the Badger job coincided with that mission ending and gave Darrell Bevell a landing spot at Wisconsin.
Obviously Longo didn’t pull Mordecai off a church mission (just a Methodist college) but similar in that the Badgers hired a coach who got a QB that normally wouldn’t have been on their radar. Now will this mean the Badgers end up winning the Rose Bowl? It sure seems like it does.
2023: Hit this one hard of course, Tanner Mordecai is the main one. We’ll get to the other two guys shortly.
Group 3: Bigger Role or Playing Time Guys
Here I’m thinking of guys who came to Wisconsin for one reason - they were looking for playing time. Pretty self-explanatory, but this is usually upperclassmen with no real connection to Wisconsin outside of an open depth chart spot.
This is also a fairly new type of transfer brought on by the rules eliminating players having to sit out a year.
Bigger Role Guys: Chez Mellusi, the 2022 DB Firm of Shaw/Dort/Clark/Latu
Verdict: I’d say high floor/low ceiling type of guys? You’re probably not going to get many stars this way but a good place to fill out the two deep and even get an occasional impact starter. Feels like sometimes these guys are necessary but if you don’t need them it’s probably a great sign for where the team is at.
2023: Some of these are gray areas but I’m throwing Jeff Pietrowski, Jason Maitre and Bryson Green in here. CJ Williams blurs the line between this group and…
Group 4: Basically Recruits
These are the “we’ve got open spots, let’s grab a guy” type players.
Past Examples: Christian Bell, Kellen Jones, Isaac Townsend, Keontez Lewis
Verdict: Generally not been great for the Badgers, though 2023 seems like a different type of player than they’ve gotten in the past for this category. When Fickell talks about being selective in the portal, I suspect this is one category that gets cut and filled more with HS recruits.
2023: Badgers hit this one hard: CJ Williams, Quincy Burroughs, Will Pauling, Braedyn Lock, Nick Evers. Of course the pattern here is that they’re all on offense.
Group 5: Playing up a level
Starters at a lower level school moving to the Big Ten.
Past Examples: We can throw Nick Nelson in this spot, but it is mostly a new category with Fickell, which makes sense since he is bringing a couple Cincy guys and players he might have recruited at Cincy with him.
Verdict: I’m really curious to see if this becomes a thing down the road. Fickell using his history at Cincy to be able to pick off a few top G5 type guys every year could be a really nice sweet spot for the Badgers
2023: Jake Renfro, Joe Huber, Darian Varner
Group 6: Hometown guys
Pretty self-explanatory here and some pretty big stars in the group. Of course the big advantage here is guys will often transfer in and walk-on which is great for the Badgers.
Past example: Joe Panos, Chris Margos, JJ Watt, Brian Calhoun, Ryan Ramczyk
Verdict: Of course with walk-ons we only remember the ones who hit and Ricky Finco transferring in from Whitewater isn’t mentioned, but overall if there’s a guy playing anywhere in FBS or FCS who is willing to come back to walk-on, you take him.
2023: Max Rader? That’s all I got. I wonder if we see a momentary dip in these as Fickell doesn’t have much history in the state.
Going back to the in on/not in on I think future transferring looks like:
In On
Bringing guys from the G5 level
Playing Time Guys
Guys Coming Home
Out On
QBs (hopefully)
Basically recruits
JUCO
Hey I didn’t wait 10 months between newsletters! I just needed a venue to complain about the weight room videos so wrote 1000 words about transfers to make it seem like that wasn’t the sole focus. Thanks for reading and not messaging me about all the typos and poor sentence structure.