Column: One take on each member of Wisconsin football's 2026 recruiting class
BadgerNotes columnist Seamus Rohrer offers up a take on each member who signed with the Wisconsin Football team's 2026 recruiting class.
High school recruiting has changed dramatically, even since I started covering college football and the process of luring top athletes to campus several years ago.
The days of the same handful of blue blood programs stocking up on the country’s top talent are over. Just look at some of the top quarterbacks in the 2026 cycle: Five-star Jared Curtis signed with Vanderbilt, flipping from Georgia. Five-star Keisean Henderson signed with Houston.
And yet, the ever-morphing process of recruiting high school athletes remains the lifeblood of the sport. The programs that consistently recruit near the top of the national leaderboard are the programs that consistently compete for national titles. Developing players and building a home-grown culture remains invaluable for success, even in today’s transactional, transfer portal-laden landscape.
14 athletes have put pen to paper, signing with Wisconsin football as part of its 2026 recruiting class that currently ranks No. 70 on 247Sports and No. 58 on On3.com.
Below, I’ll give you my thoughts on each Badgers signee:
LB Ben Wenzel (Appleton, Wisconsin)
Ben Wenzel is the lone native son in the class of 2026 (not counting JUCO signee Taylor Schaefer). Not another high school player from the state of Wisconsin pledged to the Badgers, with teams like Iowa (Brody Schaffer), Minnesota (Gavin Meier) and Indiana (Samuel Simpson) snatching up some of the state’s top talent.
In-state recruiting is an overblown talking point. In a state like Wisconsin — not a high school football powerhouse — you can still recruit an excellent class while the top talent in your backyard gets siphoned away by other schools. That’s not to say it’s ideal, especially for the perception of your program.
As for Wenzel, you have to like what you see in terms of physicality and an ability to get downhill in run support. The Oklahoma interest also intrigues me; the Sooners offered him and got him on campus this summer. They’ve played some serious defense down in Norman under Brent Venables.
RB Qwantavius Wiggins (Fairburn, Georgia)
When Qwantavius “Fatboy” Wiggins signed with Wisconsin, the writing was on the wall that prized running back recruit Amari Latimer was set to skip town. Though both backs, who both hail from the Peach State, are friends who train together, it was predictably impossible to try to squeeze any intel about Latimer out of Wiggins when I spoke to him following his commitment.
But Wiggins looks like no slouch himself. In fact, I can’t help but see a more explosive Gideon Ituka when I pop on his tape. He has the same concise, one-cut style, but appears to have a higher gear when he hits open field. Think Ituka with a little less physicality and a little more speed. Wiggins isn’t just a consolation for losing out on Latimer. He looks like a damn good running back in his own right.