UW forced to audible in football recruiting
MADISON – There is no playbook for building a football recruiting class, particularly one at least 21 players strong, during a pandemic.
With the NCAA shutting down all inperson recruiting last spring, staffs across the country had to find creative ways to convince prospects that their school offered the best choice for athletics and academics.
That includes the Wisconsin staffers, who have expressed confidence that if they could get a prospect on campus, particularly during late spring early summer, they could convince him to make Madison his home away from home.
“Boots on the ground is always a winner when you’ve got a good campus to show off and a good city to show off,” Saeed Khalif,” UW’s director of player personnel, said this week during a Zoom session. “It is a surprise to people who have never been here. So getting them here puts the icing on the cake.”
UW expects to sign 21 players on Wednesday.
The states from which the players hail: Wisconsin (6), Ohio (3), Minnesota (2), Florida (2), Iowa (1), California (1), Colorado (1), Pennsylvania (1), New Jersey (1), Connecticut (1), Tennessee (1) and Illinois (1).
Khalif, in is fourth year at UW, estimated 80% of the class was identified early and thus able to tour Madison, the UW campus and the facilities.
“The early identification was huge for us,” he said. “These are kids we had been in contact with. They had gotten on campus through camps or some practices.
“The other crew, it took some real virtual ingenuity to convince them that this was the place to choose without (first) getting here.”
Not every player in that group of 80% committed early, but eight of the 21 players expected to sign Wednesday committed in 2019.
They include five in-state prospects – Muskego safety Hunter Wohler, Verona “athlete” Jackson Acker, Grafton offensive lineman JP Benzschawel, Eau Claire Memorial running back Loyal Crawford and Homestead linebacker Ayo Adebogun.
The other three players who committed last year – Illinois linebacker Bryan Sanborn, California quarterback Deacon Hill and Minnesota offensive lineman Riley Mahlman – were able to visit Madison before in-person recruiting was shut down.
“The other crew,” Khalif said, “it took some real virtual ingenuity to convince them that this was the place to choose without (first) getting here.”
Welcome to the virtual world in which recruits were exposed to Madison’s lakes and green spaces, the downtown area and UW’s athletic facilities and campus through video after video after video.
“We challenge them to find a place that is going to have a similar balance of green space between the lakes and the urban portions of (Madison),” Khalif said.
Khalif, who came to UW after serving as the assistant director of player personnel at Georgia Tech for four years, noted that some recruits are surprised when they get their first look at Madison and UW, either in-person or virtually.
“I think they think they’re going to land in a Podunk town and outside of the buildings on campus there is no other surrounding city,” he said. “So we make a big deal that we’re surrounded by the city.
“But most of what you need in your college experience is within a (short) walk of campus. I think that has been huge for us.”
Khalif acknowledged he fielded questions from some recruits about whether Madison and UW were inclusive and determined to treat all individuals equally.
“I think some of the movement on campus and some of the messaging was able to answer some of the questions,” he said when asked about the protests and marches that took place in Madison and on the UW campus in the last year. “The world didn’t have the answers. We’re all looking for that friendly medium, that soft spot to land in.
“The youth movement. … When they could see that the (kids) were mobilizing and trying to take a stand, they could say at least there is a level of consciousness to it. Not answers, but a level of consciousness. When it is a student-led movement, it is going to get answers.”
Did UW’s staff get the answers it was looking for in the 2021 class? The answer to that question won’t be known until several seasons from now, based on how the players fare on the field.
“In the end, recruiting is about finding the right fit,” head coach Paul Chryst said.
“And for them to find the right fit, I think they’ve got to be around the players and know what it is they’re really entering into.
“Those connections that they missed, that they’d normally get (during) an on-campus visit, you try to facilitate as much of that as possible because it is a huge decision. And a huge part of it is knowing who and what is Wisconsin.”