Wisconsin football recruiting: a couple more 2023 offers go out to WRs

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 offers

• 2023 3-star WR Anthony Brown (Springfield, Ohio), not to be confused with 2022 3-star ATH Anthony Brown who UW has also offered, out of Springfield High School received an offer from the Badgers over the weekend. Brown has a handful of other offers right now from the likes of Cincinnati, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pitt, Tennessee and a couple of others.

Standing at 5-foot-10 and weighing around 170 pounds, Brown is rated as the No. 136 player and No. 21 WR in the country by the 247 Composite and the No. 4 player in the state of Ohio. Rivals actually rates Brown a bit higher than 247 and the Composite and has him slotted as a 4-star. This past fall, he had 40 catches for 829 yards and 12 touchdowns in 10 games played. After watching his Hudl film below, it looks like he also added one punt return touchdown and one kick return touchdown too.

I’ll be honest with you guys, I’m glad I stuck with this highlight video and watched most of it because the first dozen or so highlights are literally just him running past defensive backs and scoring on long bombs. They are great highlights, but not something he’ll be able to do every week in the Big Ten obviously. Brown is exceedingly fast, and agile, and is able to just run past defenders, often with ease, but later on in his tape he also shows some more actual route running.

He also shows an ability to sit in the holes of a zone and make himself a viable target for his QB. Despite being slight in size he high points the ball well and can make catches over defensive backs. There are also some plays where he lines up in the backfield and shows some good running ability between the tackles and to the edges. He’d be a perfect player to run jet sweeps in Paul Chryst’s offense.

I’m fairly confident that he’ll start to receive bigger offers, but hopefully Wisconsin got in early enough to make an impact.

• 2023 4-star WR Christian Hamilton (Harrisburg, N.C.) out of Hickory Ridge High School received an offer from the Badgers over the weekend. Hamilton has nearly 20 offers from schools like App. State, Boston College, Louisville, Michigan State, North Carolina, Penn State, South Carolina, Texas A&M, Va. Tech, Wake Forest, West Virginia and others.

Standing at an even 6-foot and weighing around 175 pounds, Hamilton is ranked as the No. 35 player and No. 4 WR in the country by the 247 Composite and the top player in North Carolina for the 2023 class. During his freshman year, Hamilton had 30 catches for 658 yards and six touchdowns. I couldn’t find his sophomore season stats anywhere, but you can see the highlights below.

Hamilton, like Brown, is a burner. He runs past defenders with ease and shows a great ability to gain yards after the catch too. He shows a willingness to block (and lay hits on people when he plays cornerback) which is always something that will appeal to a program that runs the ball as often as Wisconsin does.

Again, much like Brown, Hamilton has some larger programs (like Georgia and Clemson in Hamilton’s case) out there that are just waiting to pull the trigger on an offer once they get to see him in person again. It would be another tough get for coach Alvis Whitted and the Badgers but it is good that they are going after these talents.