What Gavin Meier committing to Minnesota means for Gophers, home-state Wisconsin Badgers (2025)

Gavin Meier estimated that, during the past week, he received roughly 25 pieces of mail from Wisconsin’s football coaching staff members. Meier, a 6-foot-6, 300-pound tackle from Janesville, Wis., was rated by 247Sports as the No. 1 2026 recruit in the state. He had made the short drive to Madison twice in the previous three weeks — for a junior-day visit and to see a spring practice — and staffers wanted to ensure he understood how much he was valued.

“If Wisconsin is truly recruiting you and you’re an in-state guy, it’s really hard to not go there,” Meier said. “I loved everybody on that coaching staff. There wasn’t one red flag with the coaching staff.”

In a bygone era from not long ago, those circumstances and that quote would have been enough to assure Meier stayed home and that the Badgers locked up the best talent inside its borders. But Meier did something that has become more commonplace among top in-state recruits in recent years: He committed somewhere else, picking rival Minnesota on Wednesday night following a mid-week visit to campus.

Why?

It had a lot to do with what Minnesota represented to him. He liked the feeling he got from offensive-line coach Brian Callahan when he attended a camp there last summer and felt Callahan was well-positioned to help him one day play in the NFL. Meier visited three times and appreciated how much he said head coach P.J. Fleck cared about his players. Meier said Fleck promised Meier’s parents that he would not fail their son.

But the truth is, Meier’s decision had to do with what he believes Wisconsin isn’t right now.

“I don’t like talking bad about other schools, but I also have to keep in mind that this isn’t the same Wisconsin they used to be,” Meier said. “Like, this isn’t the Barry Alvarez Wisconsin. I don’t like throwing shade at anybody because Wisconsin is still a great program.

“But Minnesota, they’ve proven to be good. The past three out of four years, they’ve beaten Wisconsin. Wisconsin, one more losing season, and it’s kind of uncertain. I get Coach (Luke) Fickell is signed, but anything can happen.”

Meier noted that Minnesota has won all six of its bowl games under Fleck — although it should be pointed out that the Gophers finished in the AP Top 25 just once during that stretch, in 2019, and only reached a bowl game in 2023 with a losing record on the strength of their Academic Progress Rate. Fleck is 56-39 in eight seasons at Minnesota but 33-36 in the Big Ten. Fickell, meanwhile, is 13-13 overall and 8-10 in the Big Ten, with his last game a 24-7 loss to Minnesota at Camp Randall Stadium in late November that clinched Wisconsin’s first losing season — and one without a bowl bid — in 23 years.

Meier was slated to take official visits to Indiana, Wisconsin, Auburn and Minnesota. He said he called coaches from Indiana, Wisconsin, Auburn and Northwestern on Wednesday to tell them no before he publicly announced his commitment to Minnesota. Turning down Wisconsin and offensive line coach AJ Blazek, whom he called an amazing coach, person and recruiter, was especially difficult.

Losing a player like Meier — a high-three-star prospect who is rated by 247Sports as the No. 40 offensive tackle nationally — will not serve as the death knell for Wisconsin’s program. Fickell has made it clear on multiple occasions that recruiting the state remains important, and he did sign eight in-state players in the 2024 and 2025 classes.

Even when Wisconsin struck out on in-state offensive linemen in those two classes, it added 10 line recruits total, including four out-of-state four-star players from Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Arizona. Wisconsin already has a commitment in the 2026 class from interior offensive lineman Benjamin Novak from Merrillville, Ind.

Still, Meier’s statement is a damning one because he is exactly the type of player Wisconsin should be able to retain and for years did keep. His mom, Meghan Everhart, is a Janesville native who earned a master’s degree in the social work program from Wisconsin. His dad, Matthew, spent a year in Madison taking a farm and industry short course in the college of agricultural and life sciences.

Everhart said she has pictures of Meier as a kid wearing her cap and gown from her graduation at UW-Madison, and he attended Badgers football games. Meier even acknowledged he “wanted to be a Badger when I was younger” and that he visited campus “maybe seven or eight times” as a recruit. Wisconsin offered him a scholarship on Feb. 11, less than two weeks after Minnesota became the first Big Ten program to offer.

Meier said he will enroll early at Minnesota and intends to use a redshirt year before hopefully competing for a starting spot at right tackle. Meghan said the fact that Fleck, Callahan and strength coach Dan Nichol had been together for nearly 13 years, dating to their time together at Western Michigan, was a sign of important stability.

“It’s hard when you see your home state, your team that you’ve been rooting for your whole life, not have a winning season,” Everhart said. “It’s really difficult when you’re trying to make that decision on, OK, well, I love them, but let’s look at the reality of things. They’ve brought in a great new offensive coordinator that I think is going to do really wonderful things. But there’s just so much up in the air right now that it’s hard to gamble on that.

“We told Gavin that you need to go into this having no what-ifs at all. And thinking about if you do go somewhere and they don’t have a winning season, whether it is Wisconsin or someone else, what if they don’t have another good season? What is that going to look like? That means that you’re going to have possibly a new coaching staff, new offense, new all of that. And that’s hard. That’s really hard. We have nothing bad to say about that program. But I would be lying if we were to say that wasn’t one of the factors.”

Several programs have made inroads to Wisconsin’s top high school players dating to the 2022 class under Paul Chryst, including four-star offensive linemen Billy Schrauth (Notre Dame) and Carson Hinzman (Ohio State), as well as four-star tight end Jerry Cross (Penn State). All four four-star in-state players in the 2024 class — offensive linemen Nathan Roy (Minnesota), Garrett Sexton (Penn State) and Donovan Harbour (Penn State) and running back Corey Smith (Penn State) — picked other Big Ten programs.

Then, in the 2025 class, Wisconsin missed on three four-star in-state players. Tight end James Flanigan and offensive tackle Owen Strebig picked Notre Dame, while cornerback Tre Poteat signed with Tennessee.

The volume of players bypassing Wisconsin may have been alarming. But there were at least explanations that made some sense for why none of those recruitments panned out. Chryst acknowledged the 2022 class was hindered, at least in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic, which wiped out in-person recruiting for 15 months and evened the playing field by taking away one of Wisconsin’s traditional advantages with home-state players spending time around the team.

Harbour and Smith, despite their talents, were not re-offered by Wisconsin’s new coaching staff because they weren’t deemed as good fits for the program. Sexton was slow-played by the staff and offered late in the recruiting process. Roy grew up in Phoenix, began high school in the Las Vegas area and didn’t move to Wisconsin with his family until just before his sophomore year.

Flanigan was a Notre Dame legacy whose dad was a defensive tackle for the Fighting Irish. Strebig had built a multi-year relationship with Notre Dame offensive line coach Joe Rudolph, stemming from his days coaching at Wisconsin, while the Badgers were on their fourth offensive line coach in as many seasons. And Poteat’s ties to the program were that his dad had been a cornerbacks coach at Wisconsin who lost his job amid a coaching change. Name, image, likeness payments — something previous staffs didn’t have to deal with — also must be taken into account.

But the Meier situation seems different. Sure, it’s possible it won’t matter in the grand scheme of things if Fickell can build with his players, show needed incremental improvement in his third year and elevate Wisconsin long-term into an upper-echelon Big Ten team. This recruitment may be viewed down the road as representing something bigger — yet another exhibit of a coach who couldn’t overcome all the roadblocks standing in his way.

“It’s hard,” Meier said. “I’m not going to lie. Just especially being from Wisconsin, just wanting to carry on that tradition, and ‘Oh I’m from here. This is somewhere I want to go.’ But it’s more than that. I’m happy where I’m at right now. I’m happy I chose Minnesota, and I’m excited to row the boat.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Meghan Everhart)

Jesse Temple is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the Wisconsin Badgers. He has covered the Badgers beat since 2011 and previously worked for FOX Sports Wisconsin, ESPN.com and Land of 10. Follow Jesse on Twitter @jessetemple