Wisconsin football recruiting: UW offers 2022 in-state lineman

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 offer

• On Saturday evening, 2022 3-star (247 Sports only) OL Barrett Nelson (Stoughton) out of Fall River High School announced that he had received an offer from the Wisconsin Badgers. Nelson also has offers from Eastern Illinois, Iowa State, Kent State, Nebraska and Purdue. Iowa, Michigan and Northwestern are also showing interest in Nelson who is seeing his recruitment heat up as UW, Purdue and Nebraska have all offered since Thursday.

Nelson is rated as the No. 13 player in Wisconsin for the 2022 class and the No. 142 OT by 247 Sports. Rivals has him rated as a 2-star prospect. Standing around 6-foot-6 and weighing around 260 pounds Nelson, who is the younger brother of current Wisconsin offensive lineman Jack Nelson, has an ideal frame on which to add a bunch of weight.

Nelson transferred from Stoughton to Fall River/Rio before his junior year which is a bit of a step down in competition. Nelson looks like a player who has a lot of potential but hasn’t quite fulfilled it yet (which is normal as he’s still in high school). He definitely plays all the way to the whistle and appears to relish knocking people on their asses, but there were only two clips of him in pass protection and he could clean up a number of things technique wise.

It should definitely be noted that after Nelson announced he had received the offer from Wisconsin, three Crystal Ball predictions on 247 came in for the Badgers including from Director of Football Recruiting Steve Wiltfong who normally doesn’t put in a prediction unless it is pretty much certain. Jon McNamara over at Rivals also put in a prediction for the Badgers. This would also lead me to believe that one of the 4-star in-state offensive linemen, most likely Billy Schrauth (Fond du Lac), is leaning towards heading out of state.