Wisconsin recruiting: new offers out for football and men’s basketball

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 (sometimes more) 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!

New men’s basketball offer

• 2024 C JT Rock (Sioux Falls, S.D.) out of Lincoln High School was offered by Wisconsin during his visit to campus last weekend for the Army football game and the Red/White Scrimmage. Rock currently only has one other offer, from Iowa State, but the 2024 class is obviously far away from making any decisions on their colleges of choice, so more will surely come.

Rock, who stands 7-foot and weighs 225 pounds, plays for the SD Attack on the grassroots circuit which is the same team that current UW freshman Matthew Mors played with. Rock’s high school is crosstown rivals with assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft’s high school as well, so there are a couple of UW connections for Rock already.

I could not find any highlights of Rock’s game outside of some cellphone footage of a few fall league games, but here is a video of him working on his post moves. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wisconsin will always have a place on their roster for an extremely tall dude that can shoot, and by 2024 they’ll have some frontcourt minutes that need replacing.

New football offer

• 2022 3-star LB Aidan Vaughan (Walled Lake, Mich.) out of Walled Lake Western High School received an offer from Wisconsin earlier this week, according to his Twitter account. Vaughan is currently committed to Air Force (Aug. 2, 2021), but has recently begun to pick up a ton of Power 5 offers. Just in the last week he has been offered by UW, Louisville, West Virginia, Maryland and Syracuse. He also holds offers from Bowling Green and Western Michigan.

The 6-foot-4 and 220 pound linebacker is rated as the No. 85 linebacker in the country and No. 26 player in the state of Michigan by 247 Sports. This kid has a fun highlight tape from this season. He is fast, closes on ball carriers/the quarterback with a sudden quickness and when he hits someone...they stay hit.

On offense he plays some sort of FB/RB combo position and when he is tasked as the lead blocker he goes out of his way to de-cleat anyone in his path. On defense it looks like being tackled by him is akin to running into a concrete traffic barriers that they put up when there is construction being done on the highway. The beginning of his tape notes that he is an all-state discus thrower and qualified for the state 4x100 race too.

I’m enamored by his tape and hope that he changes his mind and decides to come play at Wisconsin, because I think he could be a valuable player for them in the future.