Texas Football: Talented 4-Star ATH has Longhorns in final 8

Four-star Lincoln High School athlete Julien Simon is the latest prospect to name the Texas football program among his finalists.

Finalist lists continue to drop on social media of late for key targets of the 2021 Texas football recruiting class. The extended NCAA Dead Period for in-person recruiting contact through May isn’t stopping various prospects from cutting down to the schools they are most interested in. Texas did get more news on this front on the evening of April 1.

The latest 2021 target of the Texas Longhorns football program to drop a finalist list that included them was four-star Lincoln athlete Julien Simon. As one of the more prioritized and talented for the Longhorns on the west coast, Simon could be a really nice get for this recruiting class if he lands on the Forty Acres.

Simon dropped his final eight schools on his Twitter timeline on April 1. His finalist group is mostly made up of PAC-12 schools, which makes sense since he is a Tacoma, WA, native. Six of his finalist schools are from the PAC-12, and then he has one from the Big Ten and another from the Big 12.

https://twitter.com/_juliensimon/status/1245471006560374785?s=21

The lone Big 12 school among his finalists was obviously Texas. And his only finalist from the Big Ten was the Michigan Wolverines. The other six PAC-12 schools that encompassed his top eight were the Oregon Ducks, USC Trojans, Arizona State Sun Devils, Cal Golden Bears, Washington Huskies and Stanford Cardinal.

Simon ranks as the nation’s No. 101 2021 high school prospect, No. 5 athlete, and No. 4 prospect out of the state of Washington. The 247Sports sole recruiting rankings have Simon just inside their top 100 prospects in the nation.

The 6-foot-2 and 220 pound Washington native held offers from 20 schools, in which a dozen of them he just trimmed off. The more significant of the offers he has that he cut came from the Auburn Tigers, Florida Gators, Nebraska Cornhuskers, Penn State Nittany Lions, Tennessee Volunteers, Utah Utes, Washington State Cougars, and Wisconsin Badgers.

Texas and Arizona State are the two most recent schools to send Simon a scholarship offer. Getting in late to the game didn’t keep the Longhorns and Sun Devils from making into his group of finalist schools, though.

There’s no clear pick in yet for Simon from his 247Sports Crystal Ball Predictions. But the Longhorns do hold a firm spot in this region of the country to go after Simon’s commitment from this point on.