Wisconsin basketball recruiting: UW makes one cutdown list and is excluded from another

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 (or more often as events warrant) 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!

Cutdown list news

• Last week, 2022 3-star SG Connor Essegian (Albion, Ind.) announced his top-seven schools. Besides the Badgers, the other six schools that made the cut are Butler, Creighton, IPFW, Loyola (Ill.), Minnesota and Wake Forest.

Most of the teams in his top-seven have only recently offered with Butler, Creighton, Minnesota, Wake Forest and Wisconsin all extending scholarships within the past month, so it would stand to reason that Essegian is going to want to take some official visits before making any final decisions.

When the offer was made, our very own Matt Belz wrote:

The Badgers have been monitoring the sniper from Indiana on the AAU circuit since the July evaluation period opened up, however, the offer still came as a bit of surprise considering their still favorable position with Rowan Brumbaugh in a projected small class. Regardless, expect the Badgers to be one of the top contenders for Essegian moving forward.

• Well Belz, funny you should bring up 2022 3-star PG Rowan Brumbaugh because he released his top-six on Wednesday night and...well...Wisconsin wasn’t on it. Kansas, Maryland, Miami (Fla.), Northwestern, Oregon and Texas are the half dozen schools he’ll be considering moving forward.

The Badgers had been considered the favorite to land Brumbaugh, with the Boston College 247 Sports writer even putting in a Crystal Ball prediction for Wisconsin back in June, and they even got him on campus this summer and then...nothing happened. Some thought Brumbaugh might leave Madison a Badger in June but later he deleted the pictures from the visit on his social media accounts and now he is no longer considering UW.

What happened? Who can really say for sure, and we’ll never find out since the Badgers will never say anything and presumably neither will Brumbaugh, but it could’ve been some combination of the leaked team meeting tape and Greg Gard asking Brumbaugh to, basically, shit or get off the pot and Brumbaugh not being ready to commit.

Whatever it was, hopefully Brumbaugh finds the school that fits him and has a productive college career...although we’d prefer if it didn’t happen in the Big Ten.