WSU Football Recruiting: Monday Revealed More Than a Few Interesting Nuggets

Washington State is smack dab in the middle of a race for several recruits. For the most part that’s great news, the Cougs have garnered several commitments recently. It hasn’t been all positive though, as the Cougs lost K Tristan Vizcaino to the Dawgs yesterday.

On one hand the news that we’ve had no less than six recanted commitments hurts immensely…

On the other hand, we’re not totally out of it with two of those six (4-star recruits DT Marcus Griffin, OLB Chandler Leniu) and the fact that these guys are highly sought in itself is actually quite encouraging. Before Leach came into the program, really for the past decade before that, Washington State had been fighting off the Idaho’s, Army’s, New Mexico State’s, Montana’s and San Jose State’s of the world.

Now we are fighting off legitimate offer sheets from a lot of highly regarded FBS schools. In at least a few instances, we are fighting off or right in the mix for recruits with offers from multiple SEC, Big Ten, AAC and Pac-12 schools.

Vizcaino wasn’t the only potential negative recruiting movement going on Monday however, as the aforementioned Griffin found himself having an interesting day. Two pluses jump out, WSU visited and he still loves coach Joe and Washington apparently isn’t interested in him anymore for whatever reason. That looked to be infinitely good news for WSU. But now Notre Dame seems to have jumped in the mix to steal some major thunder.

With the Michigan State visit going down next weekend, WSU is in a serious dog fight for Griffin’s services. It’s not looking super great, but they are still there in the thick of it and if the Cougs were to win out, what a win it would be for coach Joe and the Washington State staff! Regardless of what anyone will tell you about their feelings towards Griffin after his decommit a while back, this kid would seriously increase the depth and talent of the defensive line for years to come in Pullman.

As for Leniu, he has been kind of hush-hush since his decommit from WSU and our feelings are he will end up in Berkeley over Fresno and WSU. But his family loves Pullman and WSU as a school so if it comes down to that we could see a surprise recommit on signing day. I wouldn’t bet on it though, especially if we hear good news from either one or both of the interested LB’s in the next week or two. And WSU would be none the worse for it. One would think that DE/OLB Austin Maloata’s decision over the weekend puts him in the WSU coaching staff’s limelight and he says he’s open to anyone who will recruit him. His top 3 are WSU, ASU and UCLA, in no particular order:

 A few other tweets gave us a look at what a few recruits would look like in a WSU uni; recent Fresno State decommit OL/ATH Jalen Canty and DE/OLB Patrick Choudja (another of those possible OLB’s). Neither are a sure thing at this point, but Choudja is very interested and Canty is taking other visits. Also, RB/WR Keith Harrington is pictured below, he is “for sure” coming to Washington State, fresh off a 300 yard, 4 touchdown performance in the blue/gray all star game in Florida:

Meanwhile, verbal commit Kevin Griffin seems solid right now. The corner was blowing up Twitter with WSU Swag these last couple days:

Speaking of K. Griffin, he may have given us a little inside scoop recently…

What you see there may be that former UCLA commit Barry Ware is now headed to WSU! He would be an unreal addition to this receiving class and the thought was that he was very close to committing heading into the weekend among WSU recruiting gurus. Nothing’s official yet, but we’ll get you the quickest info we can when we find out on this.

Excitement is building folks! You can find all of the verbal commits and decommits of Washington State for 2014, plus a few notes in our new “Wazzu Recruiting Notebook“.

Go Cougs!