MADISON – When it comes to grabbing offensive linemen in the transfer portal, Wisconsin is going with what it knows.

Blake Cherry is the latest example.

The rising sophomore guard, who announced his commitment to the Badgers on Tuesday, Jan. 6,  played for new UW offensive line coach Eric Mateos at Arkansas.

Cherry announced his commitment on X. He joins former Oklahoma State center Austin Kawecki, who was recruited by Mateos when Mateos was at Baylor, as the first two offensive line pickups for Wisconsin during this portal cycle.

Cherry, who was listed as 6-foot-5 and 316 pounds, played in 11 games at Arkansas in 2025 with the bulk of the work coming on special teams. He was the top backup to second team all-SEC selection Fernando Carmona.

Cherry was a three-star prospect coming out of Owasso High School in Oklahoma. He joins an offensive line room that underperformed in 2025 but featured some promising young players like tackle Emerson Mandell and guard Colin Cubberly, who will be a redshirt sophomore next season.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Michael Schumacher, a Wisconsin author who produced a diverse array of works ranging from biographies of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and musician Eric Clapton to accounts of Great Lakes shipwrecks, has died. He was 75.

Schumacher’s daughter, Emily Joy Schumacher, confirmed Monday that her father passed away on Dec. 29. She did not provide the cause of death.

Schumacher produced such varied biographies as “Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life;” “Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton;” and “Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg” — a prominent Beat Generation poet and writer.

Other biographies included “Mr. Basketball: George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers & the Birth of the NBA” and ”Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics.” Eisner was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in American comic books and was a pioneer of the graphic novel concept.

Though he was born in Kansas, Schumacher lived most of his live in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He studied political science at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside but left the school just one credit short of graduating, his daughter said. He gravitated toward writing at a young age, she said, and basically built two writing careers — one focused on biographies and another on Great Lakes lore.

Living on the shores of Lake Michigan in Kenosha, Schumacher produced accounts of how the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a storm on Lake Superior in 1975; a November 1913 storm that claimed the lives of more than 250 Great Lakes sailors; and how four sailors fought to survive on Lake Michigan after their ship sank in a storm in 1958.

Emily Joy Schumacher described her father as “a history person” and “a good human.” She said he worked longhand, filling countless flip notebooks and later transcribing them on a typewriter. She said she still remembers the sound of the keys clacking.

“My dad was a very generous person with people,” Emily Joy Schumacher said. “He loved people. He loved talking to people. He loved listening to people. He loved stories. When I think of my dad, I think of him engaged in conversation, coffee in his hand and his notebook.”