Hello: Freddy Canteen and Brandon Watson
(via Rivals)
Per multiple sources, commitments once again come in pairs. Michigan has picked up pledges from Eastern Christian Academy (Elkton, MD) teammates WR Freddy Canteen and CB Brandon Watson.
Informative post coming once Ace finds electricity. Someone get that man a kite and a key.
Congratulations to these two young men. Welcome to Michigan!
Welcome to the real (non-virtual) world!
I just dont get it for now. I take it this means were giving up on westphal as well? It's june and hoke is letting up on blue chips already. I can understand if in the Winter hoke wants to fill the class like this but when Jackson, Smith, Westphal, and even Scott and Williams have you, i dont know. I trust hoke I just wish he would rally the sleeper of the year guys at the end.
- Jackson is a pipe dream, he is NOT coming to UM.
- Smith....long-shot.
- Westphal is this year's version of Jordan Diamond or LaQuon Treadwell: loves UM early, never commits, ends up elsewhere.
- Scott is committing to Clemson next week.
- Williams is basically the same type of WR that UM already has in abundance.
I know. But with 7 months until NSD why not at least dream for a little longer with some of those guys. And williams would be the most highly regarded of the "wr in abundance" that we have on campus. Darboh and then a bunch of question marks. Sorry I just hate when I feel like Hoke rushes into a commitment instead of waiting out the storm with a chance at an elite level talent. As if Hoke is above the recruiting process and players either are in or not and can't take their time unless they're derrick green.
but if they really weren't good, the coaches could have just offered later and pulled them away from Rutgers if they had to, while we waited to see who we could get. These guys have just recently hit the camp circuit, and their offers have been blowing up because of that, and they are winning competitions against more highly rated players, leading one to believe they are probably actually pretty good, just not well scouted.
They play for a "virtual" school and only played 3 games last year. So your point about them not being well scouted could not be more on the money.
I just told my wife we're separating. I have to keep myself available in case Khalissi shows some interest in me. Wish me luck.
The likely reason these kids aren't blue chips and were only recently offered is because their school is less than 2 years old, there are maybe 50 students, they have neither a building, or a home stadium,and they only played 3 games this season. Now that they're hitting the camp circuit their ability is seperating them from the rest of the pack.
when they camped at Michigan, I'm all right with it. These guys haven't camped much, so the lack of stars does not mean much, and I bet Hoke would have offered them later if he was desperate for receivers. Therefore, I trust that the coaches saw something in them that more than sufficiently met the team's needs. Now, they can turn their focus to landing Hand and, I'm hoping, Montae Nicholson, among others.
Do you have any evidence that Hoke is letting up on any blue chips?
Well when you're limited on scholarships and you're in on 6-8 of the top 100 players (although many are unlikely to come) you don't just hand out two scholarships to unknowns. I can see Freddy Canteen but Watson has been just as exposed as Canteen and has little hype regarding him. And I don't buy the excuse that they havn't camped that much. They went to a school where you literally just study Football. So no concrete evidence but there's likely no way Hand, Mcdowell, Westphal, Nicholson, an OL, a LB, and one of those 4 california guys end up together in this class. I'm just saying this limited them with 7 months to go til NSD
Sorry I had an opinion. Didn't mean to blow your mind on a blog (sips koolaid and gets back to agreeing with everything WolvinLA2 thinks).
I'm always a little blown away by these posts, too, only because people with so little information are so confident in their views. Our coaches know 1,000,000x more than us about (1) how good these recruits look as prospects, (2) how good the other guys look as prospects, (3) how well everyone fits on the roster, (4) how likely different guys are to commit, (5) what the team needs most (and how the rest of the roster looks going forward), (6) how best to allocate time between game prep and recruiting during a season, ... and on and on. I'm all for being disappointed when we swing and miss on some guys and then clearly have to settle for lesser prospects, but there's very little evidence of that here. Our coaches saw these guys up close and offered knowing that others were available. Mattison apparently loves Watson, and Canteen is impressing every coaching staff that sees him in a camp setting.
Did you seriously expect that all of those guys were going to end up in our class? If you did, that's your initial problem right there.
You must have been perpetually disappointed on Christmas.
A week ago canteen was quoted to be the best route runner in the country. Oh and he is also 6'3". Kid hasn't camped yet so he is "only" a 4 star.
Ok but we have Jackson, Dukes, York, Chesson, Canteen, and Ways now that all meet the 3/4 star tweener who is tall but slightly regarded. Michigan recruiting at WR has been way down the last few years and Drake Harris is not going to change my mind until someone wears the No. 1 again.
Though I'm not on board with your evaluation of these offers, I do have to say that I agree with WR recruiting. That should change once we have a QB who can throw downfield.
Yep, you nailed it—Brady Hoke is folding his tent and meekly accepting scraps from the recruiting table now. What a loser at recruiting he is... just can't close the deal on highly-rated prospects. We might be doomed.
I don't think we're missing out on a great deal if Westphal goes elsewhere. I know he's highly rated in some places, but personally, I think he's overrated.
A big WR and an aggressive CB.
Here is a link to a Washington Post article from last year about Eastern Christian Academy if anyone is interested.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-09-20/sports/35495074_1_mpssaa-…
First off, admissions doesn't really clear anyone on a football scholarship to get into UM. If you meet the minimum NCAA clearinghouse standards, you get in. The only exception to this in recent decades is Adrian Witty, who was trying to get in a semester late after initially failing to qualify.
As for ECA, USC just brought in two guys from there and there were a number of concerns about getting them eligible, but both ended up enrolling without a problem. Now that the NCAA has given the place the once-over, there shouldn't be any problem getting ECA kids on campus.
The only kids who can't get in here are ones that can't get in anywhere else either (SEE Demar Dorsey, for example). The idea that there are higher admissions standards for UM football players compared to other schools is a myth perpetuated by fans who want to pat themselves on the back and badmouth schools with supposedly shitty academics. Now that partial qualifiers and Prop 48 guys are pretty much a thing of the past, we have the same admissions policy as any program in the country. We have the luxury of not taking as many guys who are in danger of not qualifying (in the same way, say Stanford does), but anybody who qualifies with the NCAA gets in.
The only school I know of that is at all restrictive is Notre Dame, and that has nothing to do with admissions, but the fact that all the students have to take calculus, something a lot of student athletes (and people like me who coasted through Statistics in A2) aren't necessarily prepared to do.
The way it works is that various universities have a certain number of spots for what they will allow for what they consider non-standard admits. This definition varies at different schools. What it meant at the school that I worked for is students with a class ranking below 50% in their high school. (Caveat: I know a lot of high schools say they "do not rank their students" but 98% of schools will give either a decile ranking (i.e. 2nd decile = 10-20%) or give a grade distribution chart that makes it pretty easy to figure out where the student placed in their class when you look at their transcript). UM would have fewer spots for non-standard athletes than, say, Alabama, who likely can take whomever they want for all 85 scholarships. At the same time, it is likely that they have more spots than say a Stanford, Duke, or Wake Forest.
This way, UM can take athletes who barely scrape by NCAA Clearinghouse just as Stanford will as well. The difference is in the percentage of the team that the UM admissions office allows to be non-standard.
Of the athletes who are considered "standard" admits, many still will fall below the test scores/GPA's/Class Ranking of the "standard" UM freshman. They will, however, fall within the range of what UM will consider for a standard student. So while most of UM's freshman may have been in the top 10% of their HS classes and have an average SAT of say 1200, they admissions department would be happy to accept a Sudanese immigrant who works two jobs and managed to scrape his way into the top 30% of his HS class and did not do well on the SAT because that immigrant will bring a lot of diversity to the incoming class. The football players who are considered "standard" often get the same kind of treatment. There will still be a few athletes like Craig Roh who would likely get admitted on academics alone, but not usually very many among the scholarship athletes.
If I had to guess, the average UM recruiting class would breakdown something like this:
Out of 20 recruits:
1-2 Would get admitted to UM even if they didn't know a football from a doorknob
8-10 "Standard" Admits
10 "Non-Standard" Admits
Hoke could be trying to develop a reputation of closing his recruiting class early, which would put pressure on interested parties to commit earlier than later. Plus it makes it less likely that you have glaring holes in your recruitment and gives you the ability to focus on other things.
Or has it always been a top producing state?
The Baltimore/DC area is pretty strong when it comes to football. I don't think it's a new development.
Whenever people question camp offers, just remember how Channing Stribling blew up his senior year after he was a lightly scouted camp offer.
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