Inside The Huskies

Headed for Texas, UW Aims Big and Offers Beaumont-Area Wide Receiver

Dre'lon Miller from the Class of 2024 has 28 scholarship offers.

Dan Raley

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The University of Washington football team will land in Texas on Christmas Day, arriving in the Lone Star state for a bowl game as well as committed to putting a program with serious momentum on full display for everyone to see.

At the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio, the Huskies will face the Texas Longhorns next Thursday night with ESPN cameras capturing every snap.

They'll do this after welcoming a 26-player recruiting class headlined by an 4-star edge rusher from Wylie and an Oklahoma State cornerback from DeSoto, both football-heavy communities in the Dallas Metroplex. 

And, finally, they'll try to further impress any number of potential recruits, notably an exciting, hotly-pursued 4-star wide receiver from Silsbee in the Beaumont area. 

That would be Dre'lon Miller, a 6-foot-2, 198-pound pass-catcher from the Class of 2024 who received a UW football offer on Friday afternoon, giving him 28 scholarship proposals and counting.

Miller's list of college football pursuers also includes the red-carpet list of Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan, LSU, Tennessee, Auburn, Texas A&M and TCU, to name a few.

So why would the Huskies think they could land a player everyone wants from coast to coast? Here's a couple of reasons.

One, they have a wide-open, receiver-friendly offense as attractive as any, with the notable Germie Bernard making the unusual series of moves of committing, de-committing and re-committing to the UW after spending his freshman season at Michigan State and seeing up close what the DeBoer/Grubb attack could do when the teams played and the Huskies won 39-28 in September.

Also, Miller hails from the Beaumont/Port Arthur area, where he's also a standout basketball player and appears to be good friends and respected opponents with Beaumont United's high-scoring Wesley Yates, who last month signed to play for the UW. Miller retweeted all of Yates' Husky developments, including his signature moment with his national letter of intent. Their basketball teams met two and a half weeks ago, with Yates' side winning 93-63.

Miller's forte, however, is football. He comes off a junior season in which he caught 59 passes for 1,399 yards and 21 touchdowns for a Silsbee team that went 13-0 before losing to Cuerto 58-56 in triple overtime in the 4A state quarterfinals at NRG Stadium in Houston. As a sophomore, he hauled in 41 passes for 1,128 yards and 13 scores.

This Silsbee stalwart proved so fast and elusive with his 4.5-second speed over 40 yards, his coaching staff often put him at running back, where he ran the ball 39 times for 361 yards and 3 more TDs this season, averaging 9.3 yards per carry. He has a history of throwing the football, too, launching a 60-yard scoring pass as a sophomore. He also plays defense and came up with a couple of interceptions.

"How do you like No. 1?" Silsbee head coach Randy Smith asked a Beaumont Enterprise newspaper reporter, referencing Miller by jersey digit. "He could have been the best player on the field at any position that I put him."

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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