Thursday, May 26th, and Friday, May 27th were two very eventful days for 2023 football recruits in the state of Washington. First, on Thursday, four-star running back Jayden Limar, who plays high school ball at Lake Stevens High School, and is considered the top-rated running back on the west coast committed to Notre Dame. Then, early on Friday morning, five-star defensive end Jayden Wayne from Lincoln High School in Tacoma announced his top six, which did not include his local school.

Later on Friday, four-star cornerback Jasiah Wagoner, who plays at Spanaway Lake announced his top seven schools, and included the hometown Huskies.

That’s a 33% success rate with three of the top five players in the state for the class of 2023. So the question is, what’s going on with in-state recruiting? Limar summed it up very well in an interview with SB Live’s Andrew Nemec.

“I got a lot of hate after I cut them, so make sure you clarify that honestly it all was just a timing thing,” Limar said, cautiously. “I didn’t have any beef with the staff. None of that. Me and coach Lee Marks, we’ve talked a lot and have a great relationship. It was just where I was at in my process,” Limar said. “At first, it was very difficult, I grew up always wanting to be a Husky and play for U-Dub. I was building a great relationship with that staff, and we were hoping that the season they had was going to go a little bit better. Of course, they had a whole staff switch. (The coaching transition) kind of happened at a bad time. I was in the process of cutting down my list and trying to figure out who was going to be up on me. I was getting stressed with the process.”

“It wasn’t easy,” he continued. “I didn’t go on my phone for a couple of weeks, honestly. It sucked. At the end of the day, I knew they were going to get let down, because of where they were in the process compared to where I was. (DeBoer’s staff) was trying to build a relationship, while I was trying to cut things down and choose which relationships I was going to keep up and which ones I was going to let die. It sucked.”

This quote seems to be very telling of a couple of things. One, how tough it is for some of these recruits to get over the Jimmy Lake era, and the abomination that was the on-field product in 2021. The other is that the exodus from the state of Washington doesn’t seem to be from a lack of effort on the part of the coaching and recruiting staff, which is a primary concern that has been voiced by some fans on social media, and the proof is in the pudding.

Thanks to Twitter user Bud Davis, the graphics shown above indicate how well Washington is doing on the recruiting trail, both in the Pac-12 and nationally.

The first shows that the Huskies are currently second in the Pac-12 in bringing in talent for official visits, just ahead of Dan Lanning and Oregon, and only behind the recruiting machine that is Lincoln Riley and USC. The second shows that Washington is inside the top 10 nationally in bringing in cumulative talent in all the players that will be coming up on official visits.

The recruiting staff has done an excellent job to this point turning around Washington’s recruiting and putting in effort that hadn’t been shown in previous years. If they continue to do well with out-of-state talent, and combine it with success on the field, in-state recruits will realize that they can compete for championships in their backyard. Wagoner is going to be a very important first domino in turning those trends in Washington’s direction.