[msqueri]

An intriguing big athlete. I don't think we can say with much certainty whether this is a DE, DT, OLB, OT, OG, or C. It really seems to depend on what his body grows into and how he presents if (knock on wood) he can achieve better health and strength and conditioning stability than he's been able to realize in high school. Based on what we know now and the tea leaves (who he tagged on Twitter, what he put on tape, etc.), the best bet seems to be a DL with potential utility in various techniques (2i, 4i, even potentially 5). Bachhuber seems to be somebody we're putting into Kolodziej and Deatrick hands as the weight room warriors and seeing what happens. And therein lies why I'm not electing to be snarky about this commitment. The horrifying production and bare bones highlights, on the heels of so many commitments the last 4-5 months who don't seem high competitive Power Five level, gave me an initial thought of saying to our new staff "I love you, but you're not serious people." But that seems too harsh, at least at this stage, when we're talking about an intriguing big athlete we want to build into something, considering that the majority of the big athlete use cases for us come in the defensive front seven and our entire front seven staff came intact from Wisconsin, which has made a killing for years off of recruits just like this. At least for a while we can have legitimate hopes that raw material of this sort can be molded into something useful. The other thing I'll note is that a hallmark of the defensive scheme Bobby April is bringing from Wisconsin is DL in larger volume (in both senses of roster spots and size of individuals) than we've seen at Stanford in recent years, so there's something to be said about just getting potential DL options in the pipeline. This is a hard position to evaluate and on some level it's more important to just get credible options than to wait for the perfect prospect. I get Anthony Franklin vibes here....but that's probably something we'd take right now. Finally, in addition to the hope that Kolodziej knows what he's doing with somebody like this, there's also a reasonable hope that other coaches nationally have made similar kind of projections we can trust. Bachhuber doesn't look bad by the offer theory, which provides him with a bit more credibility than the service rankings/production/highlights as Utah and Washington are strong programs. One wrinkle is that both of those offers (as well as several others, including Colorado so no that is not a Coach Prime offer) came almost a year ago (UNLV, Air Force, and Stanford are the three recent offers) so it's an open question of which version of Bachhuber programs were projecting out and considering worth the gamble. But to the extent this is about frame and work ethic, it's reassuring to be making the same bet Utah and Washington made.

[msqueri]

An intriguing big athlete. I don't think we can say with much certainty whether this is a DE, DT, OLB, OT, OG, or C. It really seems to depend on what his body grows into and how he presents if (knock on wood) he can achieve better health and strength and conditioning stability than he's been able to realize in high school. Based on what we know now and the tea leaves (who he tagged on Twitter, what he put on tape, etc.), the best bet seems to be a DL with potential utility in various techniques (2i, 4i, even potentially 5). Bachhuber seems to be somebody we're putting into Kolodziej and Deatrick hands as the weight room warriors and seeing what happens. And therein lies why I'm not electing to be snarky about this commitment. The horrifying production and bare bones highlights, on the heels of so many commitments the last 4-5 months who don't seem high competitive Power Five level, gave me an initial thought of saying to our new staff "I love you, but you're not serious people." But that seems too harsh, at least at this stage, when we're talking about an intriguing big athlete we want to build into something, considering that the majority of the big athlete use cases for us come in the defensive front seven and our entire front seven staff came intact from Wisconsin, which has made a killing for years off of recruits just like this. At least for a while we can have legitimate hopes that raw material of this sort can be molded into something useful. The other thing I'll note is that a hallmark of the defensive scheme Bobby April is bringing from Wisconsin is DL in larger volume (in both senses of roster spots and size of individuals) than we've seen at Stanford in recent years, so there's something to be said about just getting potential DL options in the pipeline. This is a hard position to evaluate and on some level it's more important to just get credible options than to wait for the perfect prospect. I get Anthony Franklin vibes here....but that's probably something we'd take right now. Finally, in addition to the hope that Kolodziej knows what he's doing with somebody like this, there's also a reasonable hope that other coaches nationally have made similar kind of projections we can trust. Bachhuber doesn't look bad by the offer theory, which provides him with a bit more credibility than the service rankings/production/highlights as Utah and Washington are strong programs. One wrinkle is that both of those offers (as well as several others, including Colorado so no that is not a Coach Prime offer) came almost a year ago (UNLV, Air Force, and Stanford are the three recent offers) so it's an open question of which version of Bachhuber programs were projecting out and considering worth the gamble. But to the extent this is about frame and work ethic, it's reassuring to be making the same bet Utah and Washington made.