Signed LOIs

When I think about the trenches as a whole, my denim gets a little tighter.

is planning to sign and send around 2:00.  Per TomVH

At school I think

LOIs are binding for one year barring a release.

I'm probably late on this, but it is binding. 

Neither have I...

Ha, I had the same thought process.  For a split second I thought there was another surprise comit. 

Didn't see this link posted yet, but here is MGoBlue's official list: http://www.mgoblue.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/signing-day-2012.html apparently updated as they come in.

outside of EL?

That is a lot of recruits. 

Nick Saban finds their ideas interesting and wishes to subscribe to their newsletter. 

Everyone that is enrolled at the Air Force Academy is on "scholarship."

I'm guessing service academies may have slightly different definitions of commitment. That said, Troy's 35 is still pretty noticable.

what's even crazier is that they do actually have 28 seniors graduating. so it was going to be a big class either way, 47 gives Houston Nutt a boner. 

Yes. Everyone at the academy is on scholarship and therefore all of these guys are technically walk-ins. If a guy leaves the team his status as a cadet is unchanged. Basically leaving the academy is up to him, but his financial and academic status is the same as before. It's a lot of signees but it's not oversigning.

The Air Force Academy has a preparatory school on the Academy base that takes in the neighborhood of 30+ recruits. At the prep school, the "preppies" (as they're called) play a year of football under coaches and graduate assistants who have experience with the program. They get basically an eligibility-free year in the strength and conditioning program and to learn the offense/defense. Only a handful of those recruits shown on recruiting boards will go directly to USAFA (about 25 or so). Service Academies enroll a lot of under-the-radar recruits who have minimal offers from D-1 schools. They go to service academies a lot of times for a variety of reasons, one of those being that it was their only D-1 offer. Due to stringent academic standards, they can't go after top-flight recruits. The lower-tier recruits who show up as 2-stars/no stars/don't show up at all are more student-athlete-future officer material. To offset the disadvantage of not being able to go after top tier recruits, AF goes after a lot of "athletes" (at least they did when Fisher DeBerry was there) so they more or less had options (no pun intended) of players suited for different positions. Service academies probably have players change positions more-so than any other school simply due to recruiting circumstances. Of those 47 you see committed, there's probably at least 25 or so more guys no one has ever heard of that are headed to Colorado Springs, more than half of which are headed to the prep school.

this

This kid's statement about why he chose Michigan may be the most eloquent I've heard, and it captured so well the perspective of a smart kid who grew up in Ohio. I'm really excited to see a guy like that come to Michigan. He's also a monster on the field. You build teams around guys like Strobel.

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the system is currently being troubleshooted

We have a top-5 class and still waiting on Diamond, and that's not "elite" to you?  Look at us, we have all but 1 or 2 SEC teams BELOW us this year.  If we recruited exactly like this every year, we get a permanent standing invite to the BCS.  What more do you want?