Texas Recruiting - WAM Appetizer
Caple's latest piece. The rest is in the WAM you cheap fucks.
The thing is, coach Chris Petersen says the Huskies aren’t necessarily worried about their batting average. Success recruiting Texas, he said, is “a couple guys a year who can actually play and help you. Even one to three guys a year, I like it. But there’s a lot of competition in there in that state, with a lot of good Texas teams in there. So it’s a little tricky.”
The biggest challenge — aside from convincing teenagers why they should play football thousands of miles away from the football-crazed region where they grew up — is time and familiarity. UW coaches are regularly in California, for example, and have longstanding relationships with prep coaches there, so research on a prospect’s background is easier and more efficient. And, more simply, it takes a lot longer to fly from Seattle to Dallas or Austin than it does to shuttle between Seattle and Los Angeles.
“Any time you start going a little bit more away from your footprint, you don’t know as much, you’re not there as much, you’re not talking to the coach as much,” Petersen said. “That’s why I like being in our footprint out here. It’s the world we know.”
The Huskies still are trying to get to know Texas, where UW has offered 103 scholarships from the beginning of the 2015 recruiting cycle through 2020. That’s the second-most of any state besides California (and significantly more than in Washington, where the Huskies have offered 44 prospects in the same span, if you were curious). When the official UW Twitter account posted a graphic at the beginning of May detailing that week’s recruiting itineraries for its assistants, three of them were scheduled to spend at least two days each in Texas — including Kwiatkowski, who offered McDonald on that trip — and another was scheduled to stop there for a day.
That doesn’t mean the Huskies actively pursue every one of those offered prospects to the same degree, or that they expect all of them to seriously consider UW.
“If we can get one guy a year, that’s successful,” said Kwiatkowski, who also was instrumental in Levi Onwuzurike’s recruitment, picking up where ex-defensive line coach Jeff Choate left off. “… Recruiting in the Internet (era) is such a nationwide thing. We’re still more West Coast-oriented. We had success in Texas when we were at Boise State, and there are a lot of good players there. It’s just a matter of finding the guys who want to leave Texas and this (being) a good fit for them.”
Geography always will be an obstacle. Of the 98 Texas prospects with UW offers in that 2015-20 span who have signed letters of intent or are currently committed, 46 of them — or 47.3 percent — chose to stay in-state, per the 247Sports database. Texas and Texas A&M are the most popular destinations for Texas prospects who hold a UW offer — 13 players each, counting current commitments, have signed or pledged to those schools in that span, while seven chose TCU, four each chose Texas Tech, SMU and Baylor, and one chose Houston.
If you add in the eight Texas prospects with UW offers who instead chose Oklahoma and the six who chose Oklahoma State — for the sake of reference, consider that both campuses require less than a five-hour drive to the Dallas-Fort Worth area — that means roughly 61.2 percent of those prospects chose to play their college ball within a reasonable distance from where they grew up.
How does that compare to Texas prospects in general? It’s in roughly the same ballpark. Per the 247Sports composite ranking of the top 150 Texas prospects in the 2019 class, 71 either committed to, signed with or were thought to be favoring an in-state school. Add in Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, and that number moves to 89, or 59.3 percent of the top 150. Add in LSU and Arkansas, two more border-state schools, and the number rises to 96, or 64 percent.
Conversely, only 17 of the 103 Texas prospects with UW offers from 2015-20 committed or signed with schools west of their home state, a rate of 16.5 percent. UW landed six of them, more than any other West Coast destination among prospects who held an offer from the Huskies. UCLA signed three, USC and Stanford signed two each, and Arizona State, Oregon, Colorado and Fresno State signed one each. Only 22 of the top-150 Texas prospects in the 2019 class chose schools west of Texas, a rate of 14.6 percent.
Presuming Sunday and McDonald both end up signing, the 2020 cycle will mark the first time UW has pulled multiple prospects from Texas in the same class since 2016, when the Huskies got receiver Aaron Fuller out of Lucas Lovejoy and four-star defensive lineman Onwuzurike — their biggest Texas coup to date — out of powerhouse Allen High; both schools are in the Dallas suburbs. UW also signed outside linebacker Myles Rice out of Houston Bush in 2015 and pulled offensive lineman Victor Curne from Houston Second Baptist in 2018.
“It’s a lot of homework, and a lot of energy and work goes into it,” Kwiatkowski said. “Guys are going to want to go to other schools, and that’s part of recruiting. If we can get one, two guys a year, that’s pretty good. That’s what we’re shooting for.”
