Wisconsin football recruiting: a new offer and a discussion on 2023 quarterbacks

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

• 2023 4-star OL Ian Reed (Austin, Texas) out of Vandegrift High School added a Wisconsin offer to his impressive list of scholarships on Thursday. Just in the last three weeks, Reed has added offers from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio State, Clemson, Alabama, Iowa State and Tennessee. Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Southern Cal and UTSA have also offered, among many more. On3 Sports has the hometown Longhorns as the heavy favorite to land Reed, but after the influx of new offers he clearly has some more thinking to do.

Standing at 6-foot-6 and weighing a shade under 300 pounds, Reed is ranked as the No. 289 player and No. 16 IOL in the country by the On3 Consensus. He is also listed as the No. 48 player in the Lone Star State. The 247 Composite has him rated as the No. 333 player and No. 25 OT in the land while also being the No. 53 player in Texas. It is unclear where the Badgers would want him to play were he to choose UW.

Here is Reed’s Hudl tape. I don’t know what to say about Reed besides he just looks like a really, really good lineman. He’s athletic and strong and makes it his personal business to knock over the guy he’s blocking. It will be interesting to see which position colleges want him to play, because he primarily plays left tackle for Vandegrift. My extremely amateur opinion has him looking like a better run blocker than pass blocker for what it’s worth.

It’s definitely notable that Reed is originally from outside of Chicago and has strong family ties to the midwest ($). That being said, even with Wisconsin’s strong history of producing NFL-caliber offensive lineman, it could be tough for the Badgers to stand out in a crowded field of blue blood schools.

As if you needed another reason to dislike the state of Iowa

• 2024 3-star ATH/LB Derek Weisskopf (Williamsburg, Iowa) announced his commitment to the Hawkeyes earlier this week. The Badgers offered him a month ago, he also held offers from Iowa State and Nebraska, but shut his recruitment down early by choosing the home state Hawkeyes.

• The top remaining QB target for the Badgers in the 2023 class, 4-star JJ Kohl (Ankeny, Iowa), is staying close to home and committed to the Iowa State Cyclones. This wasn’t a huge surprise, despite Kohl being in Madison right before his decision, but it does leave Wisconsin scrambling for a signal caller in their next class. We’ll get into other options below!

So, uh, who is going to be the 2023 QB commit?

• As mentioned above, the Badgers are now scrambling to find a signal caller for their 2023 class. 4-star Brayden Dorman (Colorado Springs, Colo.) committed to Arizona a while ago and Kohl just committed to Iowa State and while Wisconsin has two more offers out to QBs in the class (5-star Dante Moore (Detroit) which isn’t happening and 4-star Avery Johnson (Maize, Kan.) who UW seems to have cooled on for some reason) but neither looks promising.

So where does that leave us? Well, there are a couple of in-state options that have been on campus a bunch over the past year in Chase Spellman (Wales) out of Kettle Moraine High School and Jerry Kaminski (Sun Prairie) out of Sun Prairie High School.

Neither are top of the board options, but Spellman has apparently received interest from schools like Cincinnati, Georgia, Kentucky, Notre Dame and Texas A&M among many others, although none of them have offered yet. He has most likely not received any offers because he is coming off of shoulder surgery and teams will want to see him throw this summer ($) before pulling the trigger.

It’ll be interesting to see where the Badgers go because they need to be taking a quarterback (or two!) every class and it is obviously frustrating to miss on their top targets for two straight cycles.