Duke Football Recruiting: Akron offers Shai McKenzie

2014 high-end three-star running back Shai McKenzie has a solid list of early offers, with one of them being from the Duke Blue Devils. Yesterday, the Akron Zips added their name to McKenzie’s offer sheet, which currently contains eight offers. Duke, Akron, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Youngstown State, Purdue, and Toledo have all offered the Washington, Pennsylvania RB.

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McKenzie has also heard from a host of major programs in Michigan, Georgia Tech, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Ohio State, and Penn State. Coaches from both Rutgers and Temple visited the high impact Washington HS star this past week, so the interest has definitely amped up.

Duke offered the top 30 running back recruit back in October, so they have been involved in the touchdown-machine’s recruitment for quite some time. At 5’11”, 210 pounds, McKenzie has the ideal build for the position and also has good speed with a 4.42 forty. He’s one of the best running backs in the state of Pennsylvania (2nd if you don’t count athletes).

The Michigan Wolverines have shown a ton of interest in McKenzie early on, so it will be interesting to see when they offer the three-star 2014 RB. That would obviously be a major offer for him, because his best offer at this point might be from Pittsburgh (when factoring in location as well).

He is the only recruit from the state of Pennsylvania with an offer from the Blue Devils, and Duke has actually offered just four running backs in the 2014 class thus far. Two of them (Derrell Scott and Elijah Hood) are elite prospects with basically no chance of going to Duke, so Christian McCaffrey and Shai McKenzie are the two high-end three-stars with the best shot of selecting Duke in 2014.

You can follow Joe Soriano on Twitter @SorianoJoe.