Wisconsin basketball recruiting: a new 2021 offer was sent out on Friday

Recruiting is the lifeblood of any major college athletics team, but following it closely as a fan can sometimes be difficult and can often be time consuming. We’ll try and condense all the recruiting news you can use into this bi-weekly post. It’ll include updates on current commits, including stats from their high school games, as well as news on players the Badgers are still pursuing. Let’s get down to business!

• 2021 3-star (on Rivals) SG Isaiah Barnes (Oak Park, Ill.) out of Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF) received an offer from Greg Gard and the Wisconsin Badgers on Friday afternoon. Barnes also has offers from Kansas, Maryland, Iowa, Illinois, TCU, Saint Louis and a handful of smaller schools in Chicago.

Barnes is a 6-foot-6 and 160 pound shooting guard from the near west Chicago suburbs who shows a nice shooting stroke and a fearlessness attacking the basket. 247 Sports doesn’t have a weight listed for Barnes and the weight that Rivals has means that he’d have to spend some time in a college weight program before seeing the floor, but as a shooter and scorer he seems B1G ready.

Barnes plays for the same grassroots team, the Illinois Wolves, as 2021 4-star PF commit Chris Hodges so that is probably a helpful recruiting tool for the Badgers. Wisconsin definitely needs to add a shooter to the 2021 class as they currently have two bigs and a point guard in the No. 2 rated class in the country.

With Barnes not even having a rating yet on 247 Sports one would assume that he won’t be making a decision any time soon, especially if he’s receiving offers during the recruiting shutdown from places he hasn’t visited.

Twitter emoji analysis

While we are here discussing basketball recruiting let’s get into some WILD SPECULATION BASED ON EMOJIS! 2021 3-star SG Julian Roper, who may have made a new Twitter account because his old one had “buckets” in the handle, tweeted out the thinking emoji.

What’s Roper thinking about? Did Wisconsin tell him to commit or they were making another offer? Is he just pondering the meaning of life and how everything has drastically changed in just a month due to COVID-19? Or, does it have nothing to do with anything and he just tweeted an emoji?

Who knows! All we do know is that the Chief Recruiting Officer, Chucky Hepburn, is going to keep trying to close players.