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Huskies Invest Scholarship Offer in 2026 Mater Dei Wide Receiver

Kayden Dixon-Wyatt has played in three varsity games and caught four passes so far.
Dan Raley|
Huskies Invest Scholarship Offer in 2026 Mater Dei Wide Receiver
Huskies Invest Scholarship Offer in 2026 Mater Dei Wide Receiver

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Washington Huskies

Last season, Kayden Dixon-Wyatt appeared in three varsity football games for Mater Dei High School. Caught 4 passes for 55 yards. Spent most of his time with the freshman team for the Southern California powerhouse.

The 6-foot-3, 180-pound wide receiver held a scholarship offer from Georgia before ever stepping on the field.

Dixon-Wyatt is Exhibit A of how college football recruiting works these days. It's sort of like savvy stockbrokers pulling together a group of investors to put their money on a can't-miss futures commodity, promising a huge future payoff.

Add Kalen DeBoer's University of Washington football program to that list of recruiting hopefuls, with his staff this past week extending a scholarship offer to this promising, young Mater Dei kid, giving him 16 in all. 

When people are fawning all over you and you haven't done anything yet except audition at camps and events, it's almost hard to stay humble.

A PrepRedZone recruiting person caught up with Dixon-Wyatt at a recent California event and asked him if anyone had been able to stop him. He had a Keshawn Johnson or Michael Irvin answer.

"Not really," the pass-catcher said. "All these 4 or 5 stars, they['re] good, but not like me, though. I'm a freshman coming up, but not like me, though."

A lot of pressure comes with being gifted with being able to throw, run or catch a football these days without any game film to back it up.

Barely a month into his high school career, Dixon-Wyatt appeared at No. 7 on a ranking prepared by QB Hit List of the nation's top 2026 wide receivers. He recently had posted a video of his first Mater Dei catch. That's not a lot to go on.

Yet the Power 5 schools have seen him on the California camp circuit and they write down copious notes and begin investing in these sort of football futures. 

Since his limited varsity and full freshman seasons ended, Dixon-Wyatt posted how he was headed for Penn State, Ohio State, Texas, Texas A&M and LSU to visit those elite programs. He had one of Deion Sanders' earliest Colorado scholarship offers. 

Dixon-Wyatt's much more involved varsity high school football career launches in three months.

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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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