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Inside The Huskies

Former UW Wide Receiver Racanelli Signs with Wake Forest

The one-time Husky goes from Montlake to Montana to the ACC.
Dan Raley|
Sawyer Racanelli is shown at the UW in 2021.
Sawyer Racanelli is shown at the UW in 2021. | UW

He was the lone University of Washington football player who decided, after losing to Montana in a monumental 2021 upset, that if you can't beat the Grizzlies, join 'em.

So wide receiver Sawyer Racanelli transferred and spent the next three seasons in Missoula, though he was exclusively confined to the training room his first year while recovering from a spring knee injury.

With a final season of college eligibility remaining, Racanelli from Brush Prairie, Washington, has cut all regional ties and headed for the Atlantic Coast Conference and Wake Forest. Well, make that every connection except one: the 6-foot-3, 204-pound pass-catcher signed on to play for Jake Dickert, the former Washington State football coach.

Racanelli will join a bevy of former Huskies in the ACC who played this past season and or this fall will join North Carolina (Khmori House), Stanford (Jaivion Green, Griffin Waiss), California (Tristan Dunn, Jayden Wayne, Caleb Johnston), Syracuse (Will Nixon), Louisville (Mark Redman) and Miami (Mishael Powell), with Racanelli adding Wake Forest to the mix.

Racanelli is a talented enough athlete that Montana had him throw the football multiple times and he even delivered a touchdown pass against Idaho State in 2023.

Still, what he does best is catch the football and he hauled in 40 passes for 539 yards and 3 scores in his time with the Big Sky school.

With Montana coming off a 9-5 season and a pair of FCS playoff games, the Grizzlies had hoped to get Racanelli back in 2025 and give him a more primary role, especially with three other receivers graduating.

Yet leave it to Racanelli, who played the 2020 and 2021 seasons at the UW, to do something different. After all, when most Huskies wanted to wipe that Montana loss clean from their memory banks, he pulled on a Grizzlies jersey.

Sawyer Racanelli, left, poses with fellow UW receivers Ja'Lynn Polk (27), Rome Odunze (16) and Taj Davis (17).
Sawyer Racanelli, left, poses with fellow UW receivers Ja'Lynn Polk (27), Rome Odunze (16) and Taj Davis (17). | UW

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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