Which schools signed the most Washington recruiting targets in 2023?
Insights from the Huskies' scholarship offers in their first full recruiting cycle under coach Kalen DeBoer.
A couple years back, I had the idea to dive into Washington’s scholarship offer data, in service of answering the following question: which schools sign the most UW recruiting targets? That study covered a four-class span, and showed, likely to nobody’s surprise, that the Huskies most often crossed paths with Pac-12 rivals Oregon and USC.
Admittedly, that exercise was a bit more instructive during the Chris Petersen era, when the Huskies offered fewer prospects than nearly every Power 5 school (and took pride in it). But I think it’s still interesting to look at each prospect who reported an offer from the Huskies in coach Kalen DeBoer’s first full cycle, and sketch a portrait of which type of programs those prospects end up signing with — and, more importantly, which programs present the most direct competition to UW on the recruiting trail.
This data does come with a few caveats. The previous staff, for example, already had put out a certain number of offers to 2023 prospects, though the overwhelming majority came from DeBoer’s staff.
It’s always important to remember, too, that not all scholarship offers carry the same weight. Some are made to prospects whom the staff badly wants. Some are made to prospects whom the staff wanted at one time, but ultimately stopped recruiting. Some are made to prospects whose commitments the staff would have accepted, but not once they filled up at that prospect’s position. Some are made to prospects from other parts of the country who probably aren’t likely to consider Washington, but still are worth offering in order to feel things out. And there always is the chance that some offers were overstated publicly, or made in private but never reported.
The data isn’t perfect. In the aggregate though, it can be instructive.
With that out of the way, here’s a reminder of roughly where UW stood nationally, under Petersen, when it came to total scholarship offers per cycle, courtesy of the 247Sports database: