Key Wisconsin Badgers: No. 24 - Tight end Tucker Ashcraft

Wisconsin's 2024 football season is right around the corner, so BadgerBlitz.com ranked the top 30 players who we think will be the keys to success for Luke Fickell's squad this year.

Playing time, past performance and positional depth all factored into our staff rankings.

Tucker Ashcraft is one of the more interesting recruiting stories on the roster, given how his recruitment went down. Once committed to Colorado, he was dropped from the Buffaloes' recruiting class when Deion Sanders took over as head coach. That left the tight end scrambling to find another program.

In the 11th hour of his recruitment, Ashcraft's decision came down to Wisconsin and Washington, his hometown school. But even without a tight ends coach on staff at the time, the Badgers managed to pluck Ashcraft from the West Coast and make him their sole tight end in the class of 2023.

"The culture, coaches and the academics were the biggest thing for me," Ashcraft told BadgerBlitz.com previously. "Wisconsin meets all my criteria, and I love the stability of Coach (Luke) Fickell. He was at Ohio State for over 17 years and then Cincinnati for six. That just kind of shows that he wants to stick around and he wants to develop the program.

"At first the distance was something that I had to think about. But then the place was just so great that it didn't matter as much as it used to for me. Wisconsin was just the best option for me."

Ashcraft was a three-star tight end and the 8th-ranked player in Washington.

At 6-foot-5, 252 pounds, Ashcraft has the body to be both a blocker and a receiving threat. However, he needs to be consistently better at both if he wants to become an every-down tight end in Madison.

With the attrition Wisconsin suffered at tight end last offseason, the cupboard was rather bare for offensive coordinator Phil Longo and tight ends coach Nate Letton last fall. That's one of the reasons Ashcraft got legitimate playing time as a true freshman alongside Riley Nowakowski and Hayden Rucci. Of those three, Ashcraft is likely the most natural pass-catcher, and the staff appears to agree — he tied Rucci as the most targeted tight end with 16 last season.

Still, Ashcraft only reeled in eight of those targets for 86 yards and a touchdown. He certainly flashed as a receiver at times, but he'll need to catch more than half the passes thrown his way this fall.

The tight end was extremely limited this spring, and so we'll need to wait until fall camp for an update on his development and how he's being used in the offense. The potential is certainly there with Ashcraft, and perhaps the most exciting thing about him is that he's just a true sophomore.

Ashcraft checks in as the second (and, spoiler alert, final) tight end on our Most Important Badgers series. This is a position group that was almost a non-factor in year one of the Longo-orchestrated offense in Madison. With Ashcraft and Nowakowski back, plus the influx of two promising true freshman and an intriguing transfer, its reasonable to expect this room to be slightly more important in 2024. The key word is slightly, however, as this unit still feels like it's a year away from being consistently productive on offense.

Nonetheless, Ashcraft will once again be an important part of this room and offense. Of the game-ready tight ends, he's likely the most versatile player the Badgers have at their disposal. His potential development — or lack thereof — will go a long way in determining how dangerous this tight end room can be in 2024.

In many ways, Ashcraft is still a relatively unknown quantity. He's coming off a whirlwind true freshman year. As mentioned, he barely played in the spring, so little about his development could be gleaned from those practices. Again, his debut season featured both flashes and growing pains. Regardless, he's once again expected to play starter-level snaps this fall. What lies in store for Ashcraft in year two?

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