5 key Texas football recruits impressed by the July BBQ

Heading into the weekend, there still remains a focus on the 2023 Texas football recruiting class as the July BBQ wraps up. Texas and head coach Steve Sarkisian hosted more than a dozen key targets of the 2023, 2024, and 2025 recruiting classes for the July BBQ earlier this week.

Sark and the Longhorns staff got to make one final impression with a lot of these top targets on the recruiting trail for the next few cycles for the July BBQ. Many of these recruits that visited Austin unofficially this week won’t be back on campus at least until after the start of the 2022 season.

Given that, there were some big pitches that the Longhorns staff gave in a fun environment with these key visiting recruits on July 28. The Texas July BBQ provides the Longhorns with a chance to not only win over these individual recruits, but also the families and overall camps that come with them to Austin.

That is big since this is a much different atmosphere that Texas will get to host these visiting recruits in compared with what they will see during spring camp or during the fall. It was also big since these recruits got to see the team actually working out during the summer semester.

Top recruits impressed by Texas football’s July BBQ

With all of this in mind, here’s a look at five critical visiting recruits this week that were impressed by the July BBQ.

Markis Deal, DL

Among the top-rated 2023 recruits on campus heading into the weekend for the Longhorns was the highly touted four-star Garland-Naaman Forest defensive lineman Markis Deal. Texas was seemingly wavering a little bit among the top schools in the race to land a commitment from Deal earlier this offseason.

But it appears that Texas is finding more traction with Deal at the right time, just ahead of the portion of his recruitment when he will round out his official visits. And Texas looks to be one of the schools on the docket to get an official visit from Deal this fall.

For the time being, though, we can appreciate how it appears that Deal and his camp had a great time visiting Austin for the July BBQ. A report from Justin Wells of Inside Texas this week (paid content) indicates that while Texas definitely didn’t make a move to shut things down with Deal during this visit to Austin, it looks like they’re sitting in a much better spot than they were just a few weeks ago.

It now looks like the Longhorns are in the mix with the Georgia Bulldogs to potentially get an official visit on the books for this fall. That will be the opportunity Texas and defensive line coach Bo Davis were looking for to make that elusive sizable move with Deal.