Inside The Huskies

Huskies Making Big Push for Ohio Tight End

The UW will have Landen Miree visit twice within the next two months.

Dan Raley

UW tight-ends coach Jordan Paopao came through Ohio to visit with tight-end prospect Landen Miree.
UW tight-ends coach Jordan Paopao came through Ohio to visit with tight-end prospect Landen Miree. / Miree

When widely pursued Ohio tight end Landen Miree poses for a photo with a visiting coach, they invariably stand in front of a Cincinnati Bengals banner. On his social media account, it's Miree, the recruiter and the Bengals, time and time again.

Which is probably all the leeway that Jordan Paopao, University of Washington tight-ends coach, needed to get their conversation started when he came through Cincinnati a month ago.

Paopao could tell the 6-foot-4, 220-pound Miree he knows exactly how to prepare someone for a career with the Bengals, if not the NFL in general -- deferring to former Husky Drew Sample, who just completed his sixth season as a Cincinnati tight end.

As it stands, the UW will need everything it can use to land a player who is a 4-star prospect in the Class of 026 and bills himself as "the No. 1 tight end in Ohio," and has no fewer than 36 scholarship offers on the table.

On Friday, Miree was the first of a large contingent of prospects to post he was coming to Montlake on the following weekend for Junior Day activities and presumably to watch the UW-Oregon basketball game.

"Me and coach Paopao have built a great relationship in a short amount of time," Miree told 247Sports. "It's real. I love it."

Pushing deep into Big Ten territory for talent, the Jedd Fisch-led Huskies offered Miree on January 28 and will host him not only for an unofficial visit on March 8-9 but also for an official visit on May 29-June 1.

However, the competition will be fairly stiff to get him to move a cople of time zones to play his college ball.

Miree, who caught 56 passes for 714 yards and 10 scores for Cincinnati's Princeton High School, seems on social media to have pared his suitors down by two-thirds.

Besides the Huskies, those still in the running for his services include Arizona State, Auburn, Cincinnati, Florida State, LSU, Missouri, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, SMU, Vanderbilt and Wisconsin.

While the Huskies seem to have made substantial progress with him, Miree won't be an easy catch. For that matter, he wears a chain around his neck that says, "7 Eleven" -- because he's always open.

For the latest UW football and basketball news, go to si.com/college/washington

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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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