Wisconsin football recruiting: UW offers 3-star DL Jamel Howard, Jr.

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 3-star DL Jamel Howard, Jr. (Chicago) out of Marist High School earned an offer from Wisconsin this past week. Howard has 11 reported offers from Illinois, Iowa State and most of the MAC. Per Evan Flood at 247Sports, Howard is “in shock” ($) over the offer from the Badgers and Jon McNamara at Rivals wrote that UW was “building a relationship” ($) with Howard back in January.

Howard is 6-foot-3 and weighs north of 300 pounds and would appear to be a guy who could immediately provide depth at nose tackle for UW. He is rated as the No. 1,070 player and No. 117 DL in the nation by the On3 Consensus and the No. 23 player in Illinois as well.

Here is his Hudl tape. He is quick and can get into the backfield with that quickness as well as brute strength to bring down running backs. There are even a couple of highlights of him rushing the passer and forcing bad passes, which is a nice bonus skill for a nose tackle to have.

Interestingly, Flood at Badger247 has already put in a Crystal Ball for Wisconsin and the On3 Recruiting Prediction Machine has installed the Badgers as the favorite to land Howard too even though the offer is so new. If he comes to Madison for an official visit this summer, one could safely assume that UW will be a strong contender for him.

Official visitor coming in June

• 2023 4-star DL My’Keil Gardner (Peoria, Ariz.) has an official visit set to Wisconsin for the first weekend in June. Ranked as the No. 364 player and No. 46 DL in the country by the On3 Consensus, Gardner is considered a pretty strong Oregon lean. However, many a player has been swayed by a beautiful June weekend in Madison so it’ll be interesting to see what Gardner thinks after his visit.