Update 5/4: Removed MI LB Chris Colasanti (PSU), added IL DE Martez Wilson, linked to Irish Eyes article with extensive passage on Joseph Barksdale and article on OH S Eugene Clifford. Linked to article on Brandon Saine -- more track zoomin' -- but it looks like he committed to OSU. Linked to article on OH CB Jordan Mabin, who says that Michigan is in his top three pending an offer. Moved Martell Webb to committed.

Editorial Opinion: Um... okay. Brandon Saine suddenly committing to OSU is a bit of a shocker. Mere days ago, Buckeye partisans were downplaying his abilities and calling him a defensive back; now he's thankyahJaisus. Michigan isn't exactly panhandling for tailbacks and will be fine, but Saine's commitment is annoying. Michigan has offers out to Chicago's Robert Hughes and Marc Tyler from California.

Colasanti's PSU commitment, on the other hand, was not a major surprise.

Mabin is still waiting on offers -- Pitt is his only BCS one so far -- but has turned in a series of impressive performances on the combine circuit. He's straightforward about his top three:

"If all my favorites offer, I'd say it would be a three-horse race between Ohio State, Michigan and Pittsburgh.

"Ohio State because they are close to home, I grew up watching them and I'm an Ohio boy. Michigan because of the tradition and Pittsburgh because I have family over there."

Pitt freshman Dorin Dickerson is Mabin's cousin. Mabin was reportedly the only player who could keep PA WR Toney Clemons in check at some Scout combine or another and is thus getting hype commensurate with Clemons, another guy who is short on offers but long on rep. I would think both eventually end up with offers, and probably pretty soon.

The NFL Draft functions as the starting gun for a wide array of "where are they now" pieces from the lofty heights of ESPN to the dregs of the blogosphere. The Feldman piece linked previously is a recap of the '02 Army All-American game and provides hilarious insight into the deeply twisted mind of Tom Lemming, who put college fooball legends Jake Carney, Marcus Freeman, and Scott Raridon -- Irish recruits all -- in the game. There were no fewer than twelve Irish recruits in the game, including three tight ends! Of course, Notre Dame's legendary 2002 recruiting class would proceed to extend Notre Dame's streak without a bowl win to 58 years and leave their indelible mark on us all.

While Feldman's piece clearly illuminates the downside of college football recruiting, there is a case to be made for the enteprise other than "yay money." Do recruiting rankings matter? I tend to think yes, but it's fairly common to see people declare rankings to be useless (Braylon Edwards, AJ Hawk) or outstanding based on anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes substituting for actual numbers is a major pet peeve of mine, especially when it's something fairly easy to compile and track. Enclosed herein is an attempt to rate the Rivals ratings.

Ratings criteria:

Rivals' goal is to project high school players to college, not to the NFL. Someone like Kai Parham was a very productive college player and All-ACC, which matters more than the fact that he just went undrafted. Draft position does matter somewhat, but some players just don't translate to the NFL -- Rivals shouldn't be punished for that.

Rivals does not employ a battery of psychologists and thus can't possibly figure out which players are going to pull their piece at a McDonald's or flunk out or have several vertebrae explode. Players who had their careers derailed due to legal incidents, terminal inability to attend class, or a jumpy pancreas won't be held against Rivals. Players who can't hack it and transfer to podunk schools will, however. When a player has been around long enough so that a talent judgement can be rendered (say, Ahmad Brooks), a rating will be given despite knucklehead factors.

A five point scale is used to rate the performance of the player in college.

1. Total bust.
2. Mediocre player who contributed in some way.
3. Average starter.
4. Above-average starter. Starts for three or more years or garners all-conference recognition.
5. Star. All-American, award-winning type or just one of the team's best players.

These are ballpark figures. Anyone more familiar with non-Midwestern players who disagree with the assessments below are welcome to disagree.

A few players are still unknown, primarily guys who go on Mormon missions or get stuck behind extremely strong starters. This list punts on them.

The schools, draft positions and some hints on the fates of the more obscure members of the list were provided by a post from Rivals poster NYGator($). 2002's top 50 are below. Expect the next fifty in about a week.

Are these any good?

I think they're outstanding. If you remove the 15 players who busted out for reasons other than "no talent," you have a 63 percent chance of getting a player who is an above-average starter. The average rating across all players is 3.5. NFL teams would kill for that strike rate for the top 50 picks in the NFL draft. Even if you throw in the guys Rivals couldn't forsee would have star-crossed lives, the hit rate is still 44 percent for good players and above 50 for average starters. Hell, even some of the TKEs made contributions: Clarett, Vick, and Darren Williams.

Anyway: this is sort of pain in the ass, but I do plan on finishing this within the week.

... as you might already know, since the news broke yesterday. Webb is a 6'5", 210 pound WR/TE from Pontiac Northern who is fairly unknown at this point. Michigan offered him a month or two ago and State followed suit soon after, but he isn't getting the sort of hype many other in-state prospects are and thus attempted google-stalking turns up a bunch of basketball stories and little else. Yahoo replicated a Rivals article from the Michigan State site that has a couple useful pieces of information. 1) He believes he's a WR recruit:

"I like wide receiver the best, some schools have also talked about tight end, but I actually prefer wide receiver. Both Michigan and Michigan State are recruiting me as a wide receiver."

2) He's planning on attending a NIKE Camp:

Webb informed us that he will be attending the Ohio State Nike Combine in May and is looking forward to matching-up with some of the talented defensive backs who will be there as well.

Webb might decide against attending now that he's settled on a school, but if he does it'll give us a chance to see if he generates any buzz there.

Despite the quote from Webb about wide receiver, chances are he's going to end up at tight end given the wide array of receivers Michigan is pursuing. By contrast, instate tight ends like Joplin, Rooks, and Weaver are still waiting on offers despite Michigan's obvious need at the position. That would make Webb a project: 210 pounds does not scream ready to run block.

This is what you're getting yourself into:

EDSBS has leveled charges against the perpetrators of this... this... abomination.

Update: Link fixed; the dastardly persons removed it.

I am a bit leery of starting a regular mailbag column since I'm just a guy and answering questions from (hypothetically) adoring readers is sort of arrogant, but from time to time people ask questions and I want to answer them and if I'm going to do that I may as well post it, so here we go. Go go runon sentence.

I enjoyed your first-hand comments from the Spring Game. Any feelings about Carlos Brown's role on this team? On the official Michigan site, they list Brown as a RB/DB. I know you said he pulled off a big run in the game but with Hart likely here for the next two years, plus Kevin Grady (who we all assume will be a stud at some point), plus Mister Simpson and Brandon Minor (although these guys could end up at FB?) how does Brown fit in? Let's knock on wood and assume Hart is healthy all year and Grady gets it together. They have that 1-2 punch plus Alijah Bradley for mop-up duty. Does it make sense to move Brown to DB? What are you personal feelings on it, and what do you think U of M will do with him?

NP

Brown is a running back first and foremost, but the way Michigan has had him practice in the spring raises an interesting question or two. Brown's seen time at tailback, quarterback (in the Bass package), and defensive back. Brown was recruited as a running back and, as a high school quarterback, is a logical guy to take over the spot vacated by Bass and his mangled knee, but what about defensive back? What's up with that?

A theory: going into the spring Michigan was terribly unsure about its corner depth and Brown was the only player from the offense who had the size/speed combination to play corner. Take a look at the healthy backups at RB and WR: Arrington, Savoy, Grady, Simpson, Bradley, Tabb -- not a rich field of possibilities. Tabb is the only one who even seems plausible, but deduction eliminates him: as a fifth year senior with speed to burn, he must not be able to cut, otherwise he'd be more than bench fodder. (Though Dutch was healthy enough to drop several passes during the scrimmage, he was recovering from a knee scope at the start of spring.)

With Sears and Stewart both garnering positive reviews during spring the immediate need for corners seems to have been addressed, so Brown can return to offense for now and stay there. The only situation in which he would get shifted would be a catostrophic recruiting year that yielded only one or (gasp) zero high-profile corners.

Will he redshirt? It seems unlikely. Brown showed up in January for a reason; unfortunately that reason appears to be "wasting a redshirt year." As NP mentioned, Michigan has two solid backs in front of Brown and a change-of-pace in Alijah Bradley. Any carries Brown picks up could be distributed amongst the four (or five, pending the uncertain status of Jerome Jackson) backs in front of him. You could make an argument that getting a player on the field in his true freshman year, even for token snaps, better prepares him to make a contribution as a sophomore. Braylon Edwards saw sporadic time as a freshman and then blew up for 1,000 yards as a sophomore. However, Brown doesn't find himself in the same situation Edwards did, where he was the heir apparent at WR and needed in the following year. Grady's a sophomore, Hart a junior. There's time to develop him.

As for Simpson and Minor, both are running backs at the moment. Simpson seems too short to be a thumping, Chris Floyd-type mauler, and Minor was promised a shot at RB -- something his high school career implies he richly deserves. He's a lock to redshirt and then hopefully he'll reprise Leroy Hoard.

I'm not exactly sure what those bemoaning the demise of the Michigan program based on the mediocre results of this years draft -- Avant and Watson in the fourth, Massaquoi in the seventh -- expected this weekend. Perhaps Watson could have gone higher, but NFL teams seem to have wised up about lazy guys with tons of potential. Avant was never going to go very high because he's slow. Massaquoi getting drafted is a better result than most expected.

But the OMG Buckeyes had OMG everyone drafted and therefore the world's ending. Again, what did the panickers expect would happen when nine starters from OSU's admittedly badass defense were draft eligible? The draft merely provides a platform for those who bitch constantly to bitch with some data backing them up, as if "7-5" isn't a much more relevant data point. Also, there's this data point from last year: 2, as in the number of Ohio State players featured in the 2005 NFL draft. One of those players: kicker Mike Nugent. The other: Maurice Clarett.

This space strives to be reasonably balanced about all things largely because relentless neg- or pos-itivity is almost always irrational and therefore infuriating; I find this desire places me in the 95th percentile of Michigan (Internet) fans on the Pollyanna scale. I find this extraordinarily annoying. The facts of the matter are this:

• Michigan had an epically bad season last year that still featured seven wins.
• This was the worst season in 21 years.
• Getting there took an epic rash of injuries and late game misfortune not likely to repeat.
• No one good left the team other than Avant, Stenavich, and Watson.
• Jim Herrmann is gone.
• Mike Hart is healthy.
• Lloyd Carr still coaches like he's got Charles Woodson and Glen Steele on his defense.
• The offensive line is no more stable than JoePa's grip on reality.

All of these things except the last two argue that 2005 was a momentary speedbump and not the start of a Penn State-like collapse. Carr's coaching style is not optimized for winning, but realistically it will come into play in only a few games and cost us one. Making your in-depth analysis of the Michigan team based entirely on Carr being the worst coach in D-I football is a juvenile attempt to prevent Mr. Cranky's feelings from getting hurt when the football team doesn't win by six touchdowns and spell out "Mr. Cranky Is Our Bestest Friend" at halftime. It's not that bad.

What is concerning: three Michigan offensive linemen graduated and none were drafted. A near-crippled Leo Henige can't be expected to continue his football career, but Matt Lentz and Adam Stenavich started for three years and were not found worthy by the NFL. Stenavich measured in at 6'4" and was never exactly a punishing run blocker, making a transitition to guard unlikely, but he was still a good performer over a long span of time and got not even a seventh-round sniff. Lentz moves like a wounded duck and was a turnstile for most of the year, so his fate is no surprise, but it says a lot about how far the once-mighty offensive line has fallen when the starting guards are Henige and Lentz. One can only hope that their backups make massive strides in the offseason, because they couldn't have been very good and stay on the bench.

This is the space designated for complaining about S&C, but I don't know anything about it so I won't bother. What I do know: Michigan's offensive line is by far the biggest question mark on the team going into 2006. Bo is spinning in his grave. Yes, he clambered down into it specifically to spin at the offensive line, then popped back out for lunch.