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UW Tries to Restore Illinois Pipeline, Offers Windy City Edge Rusher

Chris Burgess holds 20 offers coming off his sophomore high school season.
Dan Raley|
UW Tries to Restore Illinois Pipeline, Offers Windy City Edge Rusher
UW Tries to Restore Illinois Pipeline, Offers Windy City Edge Rusher

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Washington Huskies

For nearly half a century, a nationally renowned surgeon in Chicago used to steer promising Illinois-produced football players to the University of Washington.

Dr. Alfred Strauss was a former Husky running back himself who immigrated from Germany to Eastern Washington and turned into extremely active and dedicated alumni recruiter when the latter was permissible. 

Strauss, who died in 1971 at age 87, arranged for no fewer than 75 players from that Midwest state to receive scholarships, among them All-America linemen Vic Markov and Rudy Mucha, big-play cornerback Bob Burmeister plus flamboyant running back Harvey Blanks.

The Huskies could use the late doctor's overly persuasive salesmanship skills today — after offering a football scholarship on Saturday to Chris Burgess, a 4-star edge rusher from Chicago's Simeon Career Academy.

A Class of 2025 prospect, the 6-foot-5, 240-pound Burgess is so big and fast at an early age he now commands 20 scholarship offers. Big Ten schools Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Purdue and Wisconsin already have bid for him. So have SEC powerhouses Alabama, Auburn Georgia and Tennessee.

Most persistent in his recruitment will be Notre Dame, which brought Burgess down for its Blue-Gold spring football game last month.

Burgess started as a sophomore coming off the edge for a 12-1 Simeon team. As shown in the Twitter camp video, he's very mature physically from someone his age.

If only Dr. Strauss was around to sweet talk this Chicago kid, sell him on the virtues of Montlake and close the scholarship commitment deal. 

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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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