Inside The Huskies

Huskies Offer Tennessee TE Who's Already Committed ... to Cal

The Class of 2023 recruit pledged to the Bears in August.

Dan Raley

In this story:

The University of Washington and California football teams play on Saturday night in Berkeley. However, it seems the competition began six days earlier.

This past Sunday, Kalen DeBoer's recruiting staff offered a scholarship to 6-foot-5, 220-pound tight end Ben Marshall, a Class of 2023 recruit from Blackman High School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Marshall committed to Cal in August. 

He's still pledged to the Huskies' Pac-12 rival as far as anyone knows.

The UW could have offered this particular Tennessee titan at any time, but waited until game week to do it.

Coincidence?

Probably not.

He hails from Murfreesboro, a city of 150,000 located 35 miles southeast of Nashville. It is known as the site for a major Civil War battlefield, where 23,515 soldiers were killed during an 1863 engagement.

The attraction to Marshall is he caught 65 passes for 834 yards and 7 scores as a junior when he was 25-30 pounds lighter. 

While this season's totals aren't available, the tight end early in the season had a game in which he came up with 7 receptions for 78 yards and 2 scores. He runs the football for Blackman on goal-line situations and has scored a few times.

He also has a little gamesmanship in him, getting ejected during a 42-33 victory over Gallatin for drawing a pair of unsportsmanlike-conduct penalties. According to the Daily News Journal, the tight end was flagged for dancing in the end zone in the third quarter and then purposely grabbing an opponent's facemask in the fourth quarter. By rule, he had to sit out the next game.

Marshall holds nearly 30 scholarship offers and chose Cal over Pittsburgh and Memphis, all of which he visited. 

When he committed, the tight end told the Tennessee News that the Golden Bears coaches had suggested he might play early. Marshall also found that offensive-minded football in the conference appealed to him.

"I really like the Pac-12 and the style of play they run," Marshall said.

Will he like it better in Berkeley or Seattle?

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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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