2009 Recruiting - Tight Ends

The people have spoken, and so we shall continue this series looking at 2009 recruiting. We’ve covered most of the offense so far. All that’s left are the tight ends. As always let’s start off with the 2008 depth chart.

Honestly I don’t know the order after Shuler. There’s a good chance Szczerba or Ditto may break the top two or three this year. Ditto suffered a shoulder injury last summer that sat him most of the year. Szczerba is said to move well and have good hands, but there’s talk that he may move to offensive tackle if he can add weight to his 6’6" frame. I suspect Wedderburn will be redshirted to spread out the depth a little bit. Tight end is a position that’s becoming difficult to project for recruiting. With the advent of the spread formations the tight end is used less and less. You don’t see the jumbo packages with three tight ends and a fullback anymore. Looking at our roster you can see all are tight ends are either juniors or freshmen. While it looks like we’re set for a mass exodus after the 2009 season with four juniors all graduating, I don’t think there’s any reason to panic. Szczerba, Ditto, and Wedderburn look like fine prospects. And with the spread offense we don’t exactly need a ton of tight ends. So I’m projecting Penn State will take one tight end in this class. Maybe two if a local four star recruit is dying to come to Penn State.

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you about some superior advanced human specimen with a freakish combination of size and speed is being wowed by Tom Bradley and Mike McQueary. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any tight end prospects Penn State is going after right now, though there may be some kids the recruiting services list as defensive ends or linebackers that the coaches are looking at. Like I said, tight ends are hard to project these days. So let’s just skip to the scholarship allocation, shall we?