The Penn State football program just lost out on elite wide receiver Khalil Taylor to the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
The Penn State Nittany Lions just lost a recruiting battle they should have won. Four-star wide receiver Khalil Taylor, a 5’11, 195-pound pass catcher from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, committed to Nebraska over Penn State and Colorado.
Taylor is a top-70 player in the country, the No. 15 receiver nationally, and the No. 3 player in Pennsylvania. For a program that desperately needed receiver help in this class, this one stings.
Taylor, who played at Pine-Richland, carries an overall composite rating of 93.17. His commitment caption read, “Taylor to Taylor,” a nod to his new home in Lincoln. The Cornhuskers landed a legitimate talent, and they did it despite a massive gap in face time with the recruit.
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17 visits and still couldn’t close
Here’s the thing about this recruitment that makes it so puzzling. Penn State had 17 visits with Taylor. Seventeen. The next highest totals belonged to Pitt and Nebraska, each with three. That kind of discrepancy is not something you typically see in a recruitment, especially one that ends with the player going elsewhere.
Nebraska had to be paying him a significant amount of NIL money to overcome that gap. However, you get the job done is how you get the job done. That’s the landscape now.
Penn State currently holds the 20th-ranked class in the country and the 7th-ranked class in the Big Ten. The Nittany Lions have four-star wide receiver Landon Blum committed, but beyond him, they have no other receivers in the fold. They needed Taylor. Landing him would have been a significant boost to a class that could use more firepower at the position.
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Did the coaching change play a role?
It’s worth considering how much the transition from James Franklin to Matt Campbell factored into this outcome. Many of those 17 visits likely came during the Franklin era, when that relationship was being built. Once Franklin was fired and Campbell took over, the dynamic between Taylor and the program may have shifted. Nobody outside of Taylor’s camp will know for certain, but the timeline raises questions.
Either way, Campbell and his staff failed to land a top in-state recruit who had been on campus more than a dozen times. That’s a tough look for a program trying to establish itself under new leadership. Penn State still has time to address the receiver position in this cycle, but losing Taylor to Nebraska leaves a gap that won’t be easy to fill.
This article was originally published on A to Z Sports. Read the full story here: Penn State Nittany Lions lose out on an elite in-state recruit in an embarrassing fashion to a worse program
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