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Inside The Huskies

SoCal DL Will Pick School on Thursday, With UW In the Running

Jon Ioane is a 4-star player from Tustin who has an interesting football skill set.
Dan Raley|
Jon Ioane will make his college choice this week.
Jon Ioane will make his college choice this week. | Sacramento State

Jon Ioane, one of the more unusual and versatile athletes of the 2027 football recruiting class, will choose his college destination on Thursday from among California, Penn State, Stanford, UCLA and Washington.

He is a 6-foot-3, 290-pound defensive tackle, a 4-star recruit from Tustin High School in the Southern California city of the same name, who two years earlier played quarterback for the Tillers.

"Not many guys my size can move the way I do," he said. "I think that gives me a real edge on the others."

The online recruiting websites, among them On3, have projected Ioane will end up at Washington.

Yet in this age of name, image and likeness resources and overall player budgets, no one can be quite sure where someone is going until the paperwork is signed.

This Tustin standout will reveal his college destination with a commitment on YouTube at 11:30 a.m. PT.

Ioane, besides being a disruptive defender in the trenches, has been a conversation piece throughout this recruiting cycle because, as a Tustin sophomore in 2024, he played quarterback at times.

He stepped up when Michael Tollefson, now at Arizona State, was ruled ineligible and moved out of state to play in Nevada.

Ioane pulled on No. 9 when he normally wore 51 and went to work as a two-way player.

He carried a 6-foot-3, 290-pound frame even back then as a 10th-grader.

In his first game taking snaps, Ioane completed 9 of14 passes for 174 yards and 2 touchdowns in a 42-10 victory over El Dorado. He threw a 37-yard score and tossed another one on a flat pass.

Yet if the Huskies land him, they'll want him to play defensive tackle and create plenty of havoc.

While Levi Onwuzurike and Tuli Letuligasenoa made some things happen in recent seasons in Montlake, the UW hasn't had an all-everything defensive tackle since Vita Vea played in 2014-17 and became the 12th overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft.

It is hoped that Ioane can bring something extra up front and anchor a defense with his playmaking ability coming out of a stance. Someone else will have to take the snaps.

This past season for a 9-2 Tustin team, Ioane finished with 50 tackles, including 14 tackles for loss and 4 sacks, and added 3 pass break-ups, a forced fumble and 21 quarterback hurries while playing in 10 games, according to Max Preps.

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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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