Big Ten Recruiting Update: Big Two, Maryland Lurks
Michigan is poised for a major in-state recruiting haul that could include Ambry Thomas [left, Rapai]
When 247 created the industry composite rankings, there was no longer a good reason for me to continue putting together the old Big Ten recruiting rankings posts. In the absence of those, however, I haven't done a great job of providing an overview of conference recruiting in the roundups. This new, recurring feature should rectify that issue—I plan to publish these on a monthly basis.
While it should come as little surprise that Ohio State and Michigan have separated themselves from the pack, the current rankings of the rest of the conference aren't exactly what you'd expect. Via 247, here's how the Big Ten team rankings currently stand:
[After THE JUMP, separating the conference into tiers.]
The Big Two
There's no fun way to put this: not only does Ohio State have the top-ranked 2017 class in the country, they have it by a healthy margin. 12 of their 13 commits are composite four- or five-stars; the only exception is top-ranked kicker Blake Haubeil. The Buckeyes are heavily involved with several top uncommitted prospects, including five-stars Jeffrey Okudah, Trevon Grimes, and Chase Young. Four-star RB Todd Sibley is almost guaranteed to end up elsewhere after OSU told him he'd have to grayshirt, and five-star CB Shaun Wade is looking around a bit; there's likely to be attrition from within the class. That said, it's going to be very tough for any team—Michigan included—to overcome OSU's lead.
You are, in all likelihood, quite familiar with Michigan's class, which currently ranks ninth in the country. If Jim Harbaugh closes as expected, they're likely to be in the top-five range by Signing Day.
The Second Tier
Five-star DE Josh Kaindoh was a huge pickup for DJ Durkin.
There's a gap between OSU and Michigan, and then another one between Michigan and Iowa—while the Hawkeyes are only two spots behind the Wolverines in the national rankings, there's a healthy 25-point separation in their 247 Composite score. Iowa, Northwestern, Maryland, Nebraska, and Wisconsin currently form the second tier, one that's certain to change as a couple notable omissions fill out their classes.
Iowa looks likely to fall back to the pack. They got two big-time early commits, one a legacy in five-star IL DE AJ Epenesa, the other a surprising pickup in four-star TX RB Eno Benjamin. Six of their other eight commits are three-star in-state prospects and they're not among the favorites for other blue-chippers. This will still be a solid class for them if they hold onto Epenesa and Benjamin.
Northwestern is 12th nationally, one spot behind Iowa, due to sheer strength in numbers: they have 13 commits, but not a single four-star among them. Pat Fitzgerald has found success targeting Texas recruits the high-end Big 12 schools aren't heavily pursuing; Northwestern has five Texans in the class, more than any other state.
The hire of DJ Durkin has paid off on the recruiting trail for Maryland, ranked 15th nationally. If a Big Ten program is going to challenge the top two, it'll be Maryland, as Durkin is doing an excellent job of keeping DMV-area talent close to home. Five-star DE Josh Kaindoh, a DC transplant playing for IMG Academy, was a massive pickup in that regard, and the Terps are hanging right with OSU in the race for five-star MD DE Chase Young.
Mike Riley has pulled in nine commits from eight different states for Nebraska (17th nationally), including the sixth-ranked pro-style QB in Californian Tristan Gebbia. The Huskers are among the favorites for two top-tier California cornerbacks, five-star Darnay Holmes and four-star Deommodore "Clamp Clampington" Lenoir. Landing either would be a coup.
Five of Wisconsin's ten commits are in-state prospects, and it should come as little surprise that both of their four-star pledges are offensive linemen. The Badgers rank one spot behind the Huskers in the national team rankings, but Nebraska has a better shot at landing the top-end prospects to keep them in the top 20.
The Third Tier
Sooooooooo.
While Penn State only has eight commits and only ranks 21st in the country at the moment, they're going to surpass several of the teams listed above before the end of the cycle. There are already four four-stars in the class and James Franklin has PSU among the favorites for five-star APB De'Andre Swift, four-star OG Robert Hainsey, four-star OLB Nathan Proctor, and four-star TE Matt Dotson, to name a few.
After Chris Ash managed to convince a few top New Jersey recruits to stay in the state, at least for now, Rutgers comes up next in the rankings. Four-star NJ OT Micah Clark is the jewel of the class; if Rutgers falters during the season, which would come as little surprise, several other programs (Michigan potentially included) will try to pluck him from Ash's grasp.
At long last, we've reached Michigan State, which sits one spot behind Central Michigan at #31 in the team rankings—so far, their playoff appearance isn't paying off on the recruiting trail. Now that KJ Hamler has his much-coveted Oregon offer, legacy Hunter Rison could be the only prospect standing between MSU and a shutout among the top ten in-state players. Of the uncommitted players on that list, only Hamler and Deron Irving-Bey look like decent bets to end up in East Lansing; Oregon may have jumped into the lead for the former, while Michigan has picked up its pursuit of the latter.
The Basement
There's a veritable gulf between the Spartans and the rest of the Big Ten. MSU has eight commits and ranks 31st overall; Minnesota is next at #65 with three commits. Given the uncertainty surrounding the coaching staff after Jerry Kill's departure, it's hardly a surprise the Gophers are struggling to land recruits.
Given the hope that Lovie Smith would jump-start recruiting because of his NFL success, Illinois' class can only be categorized as a major disappointment. They also have three commits, only one ranked in the top 850 overall prospects, and they hardly have any Crystal Ball predictions in for three-star recruits—the lone four-star they had picks for, guard Kevin Jarvis, is committed to MSU.
Indiana follows with three three-star commits all ranked below 800th overall. That still puts them well ahead of Purdue, which has been stuck on one commit: low three-star dual-threat QB Griffin Alstott, son of Boilermakers legend Mike Alstott.
Serious question. How long will JH be at Michigan? The longest head coaching stretch for him is 4 years. Do you see him sticking around for 10 to 15 years?
but that's because he received clear step ups for performing well or worked with a big idiot. He went from San Diego (FCS) to Stanford (Pac-12). Then after he built Stanford into a powerhouse he was hired by the 49ers. The NFL as is does not have a very high retention rate with coaches as is. So yea, I expect him to stay awhile. And even if he doesnt stay more than 7-8 years, I fully expect him to bring Michigan football to a pinnacle that would attract any top name coach or have future coaches in the pipeline (Durkin, Drevno, Jay Harbaugh).
This is home. Those places weren't.
He's moved up a level or two each time he switched jobs. I suppose the next to last one is debatable, but it seemed like it at the time. I think if he wants to move up again, it won't be to coach, but some higher ambition.
He sure looks like he is having a blast coaching Michigan. If I were a betting man I would place my wager on him retiring here.
Besides, who knows? He seems very happy and his kids are in Ann Arbor schools, which are great. He's treated with enormous respect at Michigan, which is a far cry from the way he was treated at San Francisco. And he and his family have to appreciate the support he gets from Michigan fans. On the other hand, it's a big world and he's a smart, savvy, competitive guy who doesn't shy away from new challenges. Let's enjoy the moment.
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they would be proud of their team. And he was right.
He was so sure of his guarantee, if you were on his team you could get a tattoo of it.
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OSU's recruiting makes UM's on-field performance this year even more critical. IF UM finishes top-5 in the country...then I think their recruting advantage starts to close.
that way. We'll have some real head to head battles with them, of course, but neither class will be defined by those. Both have a local base, but rely more on out of region recruiting than they used to. That move means a lot less overlap of our top targets. I think our resurgence will help OSU recruit nationally. I think their being on top in recruiting helps us too. as long as we show we can compete on the field.
Because there is still so much that will change. Guys will get bumped in ratings, some guys will drop, some guys will decommit, some surprises will commit, obviously guys will underplay and others will overplay their rankings. It's late June, it's a long, long way until signing day.
The plain fact is that as long as Urban Meyer is coach at Ohio State, the best we can hope for is parity in the rivalry. Urban Meyer is, by objective accomplishment and by the eye test, one of the two best coaches in college football. He and Saban are the only two active coaches to have won multiple national titles. Walking backward, the list of coaches to have achieved that is surprisingly small: Joe Paterno (last one in the 80s), Bobby Bowden, Pete Carroll, Tom Osborne, Dennis Erickson (those Miami teams...), and Barry Switzer dating back to the 80s. That's it.
A recruit knows that under Saban or Meyer: they will win big, they will play in the playoff, and they will have a great shot at the NFL. Nobody else, not even Harbaugh, can yet promise this to a recruit.
Hopefully JH gets to the same level. He has made a good start. This year is crucial to prove that he is on the way there.
The biggest concern for me is that I think Myer understands recruiting a lot better than Harbaugh. Myer knows the importance of going after the big fish with abandon, and isn't caught up in holding a million sattelite camps which are going to yield low ranked recruits. And the makeup of the classes reflects that.
I think it's pretty clear that Harbaugh goes after the big fish. And it's pretty clear that, for all the worrying we did last year about the volume of 3-stars last summer, Harbaugh finishes big and lands strong recruits.
It's hard to make any judgments beyond that. Michigan finished neck-and-neck with OSU in recruiting last season and landed the top recruit in the country. OSU's big lead this year was built before Michigan had snapped a ball in anger. The key now is to prove that Michigan merits the same standing as OSU in the eyes of recruits by winning on the field. This year.
Beyond that it is impossible to evaluate whether or not Harbaugh's recruiting approach is missing anything.
You are completely wrong with the idea that Harbaugh doesn't understand the importance of going after the big fish with abandon. That's one of the reasons they haven't gotten more commits yet, they have a lot of top targets who decide late and they are actively recruiting plenty of top guys who have committed elsewhere but Michigan thinks they can flip. Michigan is finally using it's vast resources in recruiting with a larger staff, allowing them to have a bigger recruiting board and stay in frequent contact with more recruits.
The Satellite camps are just one part of that larger recruiting budget and they serve a lot more purposes than finding diamond in the rough types. If you look at the locations chosen, they are in very specific places, either at the school of a top recruit or in the city. It's a way of showing interest and making it hard for the recruit not to show up and see the coaches in action. Lets kids who might not be able to make an unofficial see Michigan up close and feel important. Additionally, it gets the Michigan name out there. The last time Michigan was relevant in the MNC picture, the current recruits were in elementary school, and now there is hardly a week that passes that Michigan isn't in the news for camps or something Harbaugh did or how someone reacted to something Harbaugh did. And finally, there's a long game aspect of getting kids who are going into 9th, 10th or 11th grades interested in Michigan by attending these camps and seeing the staff. There are several kids in this class who have mentioned interest in Michigan because of a satellite camp last year and there are even more camps this year. Sure, Michigan may find 1 or 2 3 stars they like but it's not the goal of the camps.
Some people took what Gene Smith said about camps as a slight (that if he was rebuilding a program he might consider satellite camps too), but he was speaking the truth. Michigan is in a rebuilding mode and Harbaugh is working his ass off to get back to the Bo years or better.
Harbaugh came in very far behind Meyer in recruiting. Both in terms of relationships and in our success on the field. Meyer's 2017 class only has 3 players who committed since Harbaugh had coached a single game at Michigan. You used the right word, abandon. Harbaugh is the one showing abandon in going all out to close that gap. If the situations were reversed, Meyer would have to adjust how he does things. No doubt he understands recruiting at a high level.
In claiming that Harbaugh doesn't too, you're just proclaiming your own ignorance. Did you actually expect him to be recruiting at a higher level than he is so far? He looks to be pulling in two straight top 5 classes. He's done that despite having relatively little in state talent to rely on in his first class, and much less success on the field to sell.
As someone else pointed out, you don't understand what the satellite camps are about. He used them to jump start his recruiting when he was starting from scratch. If they were only going to yield some low ranked recruits, you wouldn't have everyone else following his lead or worried about him holding them in their part of the country.
Apart from that, I have seen no evidence whatsoever that Harbaugh fails to understand the importance of going after "big fish." And there is evidence of the opposite -- the finish to our 2016 recruiting class. The top players want to win college championships and they want to play in the NFL. Without the established record on those fronts that the Meyers of the world have, Harbaugh if anything has done better with top players than would ordinarily be expected. The next step in building Michigan into a recruiting powerhouse is to show that we are big-time winners. Once we are consistently beating top teams the way we beat Florida this year, top-ranked recruits will follow.
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Right, cause we got the #1 recruit in the county last year cause.. well... errr.....
Ohio State's class looks incredible, but it's a long way to NSD and who knows if they'll be able to keep them all. I'll worry about their class after it's signed.
They may keep them all but BFD. OSU has seldom had a problem pulling in talent, and it hasn't always worked out for them.
Yeah yeah that sounds like sour grapes, and they're legitimately formidable now, but I remember Michigan punching above their weight against more talented OSU squads because the latter had less cohesion. 2013 comes to mind. We lost, but by a single point. With Borges running the same damn plays everyone else had on tape. And DG playing with a broken foot. OSU's defense was biting on bait that MSU practically laughed at. Last season OSU futzed around until MSU woke them up, almost losing to NIU. They don't always make the best use of the talent they have (something we've been VERY familiar with on our side the past few years).
Star rankings matter. I'm not here to dispute that. Harbaugh's trying to close the recruiting gap because he knows that. But, while he's also doing that, he's also scouring the country for under-the-radar recruits and actively pursuing 3-stars he's enamored with. Between a 5-star he can't use and a 3-star that fits his mold, he'll take the 3-star. Sitting on top of the recruiting rankings isn't something that concerns him.
Now, if OSU has simiar recruiting cohesion AND just happens to be pulling in a ridiculous class, I'd be really worried. But traditionally, that doesn't seem to be the case. They'll be tough to beat as long as Meyer's there, but this rivalry wouldn't be fun if they were pushovers. (We've been the pushovers lately and that ain't fun either, but we got the right guy to fix that.)
OSU class is rated 70 points higher than ours, while the No. 2 team (Michigan) and the No. 10 team are separated by less than 70 points.
It looks like OSU has separated themselves from the rest of the pack and nearly everyone else, inlcuding us are packed together, which is concerning.
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Let's face it, sparty can't continue to win at the level they have without getting the big timers out of their own state - the ones Rodriguez and Hoke couldn't always keep away from Dantonio.
It does appear that the in-state guys Harbaugh wants are looking at Michigan first. If this trend continues for a couple years, MSU is going to slide at least a little bit. They aren't going to win Big 10 titles when the best players they're pulling are guys ranked 8th or 9th in the state of Michigan.
Subtract Burbridge alone off of last year's team and you're already talking at least one more loss and no Big 10 title. Imagine this year's team without McDowell, for that matter.
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I realize OSU is kicking everybody's ass on the recruiting trail. BUT, all other things being equal, which is preferable:
1) Recruit a top-3 class every year, but lose about 1/3 of each class to early NFL-draft entry; or
2) Recruit a top-10 class every year, but lose only about 1/10 of each class to early NFL-draft entry.
I don't think the answer is obvious. In the first scenario, you have more talented players coming through your program. But the difference in talent level is only slight, and in the second scenario you would tend to have more experienced upper-classmen.
In scenario 1, of course, since you lose more players every season to the draft, you are going to have more empty spots to replace--a factor which in and of itself tends to improve class quality (since you have more recruits per class, and thus a better chance of particular recuits being ranked highly enough by the services to drive up your numerical score). The opposite is true in scenario 2, as you will have less turnover and thus fewer recruits in any given cycle. But a team in scenario 2 may actually be better off, as you may not need a 5-star freshman at a given position if you've already got a high-quality junior who is staying in school.
Something to think about, anyway.
I don't think that your scenario is actually on the table; this strikes me as a false choice. And, at any rate, OSU is not going to lose 8-10 guys early every year. Some years, yes, but that's when they have such incredible talent that they lose two games in two years and win a national title while beating us twice. Alabama, #1 in recruiting every year and the reigning champions, sent only 2 players. And Clemson, which hovers around #10 in recruiting every season (the ballpark you've suggested) lost 7 guys.
So I would rather recruit in the top 3 every season. Without question.
Pulling in top-5 recruiting classes is important. Being the #1 recruiting class is not.
Recruiting rankings matter on a holistic level, but when it comes to on-field performance the parts are more important. People are making a way bigger deal out of Ohio's recruiting numbers than is warranted. If Michigan was in OSU's place -- as in, way out in front of everyone else -- I'd be going, "That's nice but we still gotta develop the talent and win the games." Exhibit A: Ryan Glasgow vs. Will Campbell. Yes, they're exceptions but again, all I'm saying you need a GOOD recruting class. Being statistically the best one doesn't mean anything.
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At this stage in the cycle last year OSU was way out in front of everyone too. Their success has been early. As the cycle progresses they fall back to the pack to the point they finished fourth and barely ahead of Michigan. Im not going to wring my hands over this.
I love seeing State behind 3 teams in state even if it is early. Thier fanboy hubris will make for great shadenfreude.
At this stage in the cycle last year OSU was way out in front of everyone too. Their success has been early. As the cycle progresses they fall back to the pack to the point they finished fourth and barely ahead of Michigan. Im not going to wring my hands over this.
I love seeing State behind 3 teams in state even if it is early. Thier fanboy hubris will make for great shadenfreude.
UM may be second, but it's a distant second. UM had a much improved year last year, but really needs to capitalize on it's senior laden team and OSU's NFL departures. If UM can have a better year than OSU including a head-to-head victory that would be a good start to closing the talent gap and should give Harbaugh et al. a strong finish to this year's class as well as a good start to next year's class. If however UM looses to OSU again and/or has a worse record, it will be tough to close that gap in the near future. OSU is young this year and UM is senior laden. The Game in 2017 will be a challenging one for UM to win with all the seniors it will lose from it's roster after this year. Three straight losses to OSU will be a difficult gap to overcome anytime soon. Here's to hoping for UM's first win in Columbus in over a decade.
Tacopants has been photographed!!
He's the (apparently) 7'9" wide receiver who has gotten a half a step ahead and inside position.
And Thomas is (checks profile) 5'11" 1/2!!!!! The blue shirted guy makes him look positively tiny!
I be certain ...that...my best friend had been realie taking h0me money part-time on their apple laptop. . there friend brother haz done this 4 less than 10 months and as of n0w paid the loans on their h0me and bourt a brand new Cadillac .
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