Taking a closer look at a few 2025 recruits

In today's newsletter ...

• Highlights of football’s recruiting class (so far)

  • The QB: Steele Pizzella

  • The Highest-Rated Recruit: Kyle Peterson, safety

  • The Most Interesting Guy: Austin Simmons, tight en …

Last week, I put the 2025 recruiting class in context and analyzed what it means for where WSU is headed in this post-Pac-12 world. If you missed it, you can read it here.

This week, I want to look at a few guys who stood out to me as I was digging around and looking at videos.

Highlights of football’s recruiting class (so far)

The QB: Steele Pizzella

Sherman Oaks, Calif. | 5-foot-11.5 | 165 pounds

Notable offers: Colorado State, Connecticut, Delaware State, Florida Atlantic, Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, Purdue, Texas A&M, Utah.

Highlights:

Quarterback is what everyone wants to know about first, and not without good reason: As the QB goes, the team usually goes, and while transfer rules have made it a bit less essential to always recruit this position well at the high school level, it’s still important to have a line of potential good ones on the roster.

To that end, is there anything better than this??

WE BEAT OUT GEORGIA AND TEXAS A&M FOR A QB! PRINT THE SHIRTS!!

OK, just kidding. Sort of. I’ll get back to that in a second.

What is most interesting to me about Pizzella is that he is a further departure from the kinds of tall, strong, big-armed QBs that have been Washington State’s legacy for literal generations. He’s listed by 247Sports at “5-foot-11.5,” which makes me chuckle, because throwing on that extra .5 means that someone, somewhere, really, really wants to make the point that he’s not actually too short to be a college QB.

When you watch the video of his highlights, it’s easy to see that he actually is quite short. I’m not going say he’s not 5-11.5, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if there was some fudging going on there. And 165 is very, very light.

However, what he lacks in size, he makes up for in pure, unadulterated, speed: He ran a 10.64 100-meter in track last spring, and when he breaks the pocket as a QB, it’s absolute havoc for the defense.

Of course, quarterbacks don’t just run around. Pizella seems like an accurate enough thrower, and while his arm doesn’t wow you, it certainly appears good enough for this level, despite a bit of a weird motion in which he doesn’t really drive through the throw and kind of flicks it off his back foot — perhaps a function of his height? He does seem very accurate on the move — again, if I’m speculating, might be a function of cleaner sight lines — which is a really great ability to have if your legs afford you the opportunity to buy time and space.

Pizzella’s particular combo of size and speed makes him a uniquely intriguing quarterback prospect for Washington State, and I’m guessing it’s that athletic profile that is behind his offers from Georgia, Texas A&M, and other Power Four schools. I can’t find anything concrete, but I have to believe those programs— which regularly recruit five- and four-star high school QBs who are fast and also big and ALSO tall — were interested in Pizzella as a receiver rather than quarterback. But that does give you sense of his legitimate athleticism.

At WSU, Ben Arbuckle will be trying to maximize that athleticism from behind center. Which leads me to wonder what this might be signaling for WSU’s recruiting philosophy at QB. Since signing Cam Ward, WSU seems to be focusing largely on mobile, athletic quarterbacks: John Mateer (2022), Evans Chuba (2024), Zevi Eckhaus (2024) and Pizzella. Chuba is tall and big armed (if erratic as a passer), but the other three are neither tall nor strong armed. The only one who doesn’t fit that mold is 2023 recruit Jaxon Potter, who is 6-5.

Is this a preference? Or is this a reflection of the kinds of guys we are now able to recruit as we continue to seek out some kind of edge?