Su'a Cravens Cancels Michigan Visit
2013 elite 5-star safety recruit Su'a Cravens, who had recently listed Michigan in his top 5, has cancelled his midwest visit to Michigan and Nebraska due to a school conflict (finals). No big deal, right? Well, he has not pushed back his June 6th announcement date.
Congratulations USC?
http://www.omaha.com/article/20120528/NEWS01/120529641
Credit to rossra2 for posting this link in another thread.
He was never going to end up at UM. This one was USC all the way. Best of luck to him.
...Su'a.
So you're saying there's no chance?
I really hate USC.
Exactly. Hoke is probably the worst recruiter that we've ever had. Our recruiting classes under him have been a joke
Shane Morris, Dymonte Thomas, and Pat Kugler are can't miss prospects that we did not lose out on.
A couple things there playa-
1: "The best I've ever seen." You're like what, 14, 15? The best recruits you've ever seen probably haven't even played a down of college football yet.
2: In this recruiting class, there are maybe 3 top line recruits who we've missed out on. Cravens (asSuming he goes to USC), Levenberry, and Isaac.
Cravens has been favoring USC this entire time, it was an uphill battle from the start. It would have been a longshot to get him even if he did visit. There was no reason to expect he'd come here over USC.
Levenberry was also a guy who favored FSU at the beginning of his recruiting process. Hoke made a great push for him, and only missed on him because of the major he wanted. He would have been nice to have, but considering our LB hauls over the past 2 recruiting classes, and Levenberry would have been a best available type player, we'll be fine.
Isaac is one we did miss I feel we should have gotten. A 5 star back from the Midwest who seemed to love Michigan for a while. I thought for a while we'd get him, credit to USC for that one. But RB is a position I'm not too worried about either. We haven't gotten a 5 star back there, but we have a very good back in DeVeon Smith coming in, and The Mathlete has done a ton of stuff showing how RB is one of the least, for lack of a better word, important positions.
If we miss on Treadwell, then I'll start to worry.
It will also be interesting to see how these recruits turn out in college... I'm still not convinced that Levenberry isn't over-rated. And that's not sour grapes, but my perception may be due to the fact that the difference between Levenberry and our current LBs seems pretty insignificant (as opposed to the difference between Isaac and our current RBs).
You're implying that you need to get EVERY top prospect to be successful? By that logic, Bama will be bad for the next 4 years because Shane Morris is going to UM.
Patience. Success begets success. But it's not all going to happen in one year. If you think about how bad Michigan has been recently prior to last year, it really puts into perspective how great the recruiting classes of '12 and '13 are. And sure, Michigan was good last year, but even so, they were not good enough to win the Big Ten or contend for the National Championship.
But those days will come... it may not be this year given the schedule, but in the next 2-5 years, you are going to see Michigan back in its prime on the national stage, and with that will come the Ty Isaac's and even the Su'a Cravens. Give it time.
Quick question: was uber-all-world five-star Kyle Kalis a lock when he was committed to Michigan's biggest rival in the Universe?
With that in mind, I don't think we should stop recruiting Cravens. I know by all accounts he is a lost cause, but he had planned on doing a bunch of visits, and he seems to have put himself in a big jam by commiting to a commit date that isn't allowing him to really explore his options. It's a long way to February, and I don't know what Kiffin's policy on visits is, but never say never.
Garnett and Diamond are both really good O-Line prospects, but we had a great O-Line class last year, and even better one this year. Neither of them are can't miss prospects, especially oversome of the O-Line recruits we brought in this year.
Isaac I agree I thought we would get, but no one bats 1.000.
Levenberry is the same as Garnett and Diamond. Really good prospect, but by no means a
"can't miss", and many people, including Magnus IIRC, don't think is as good as many of our current committs. Also, with Levenberry we DID start from the bottom and rise up, essentially to a tie based on his recent quotes. We just didn't have his major. It'snot often we'll lose a kid over academics, I won't lose sleep over that.
Cravens was a USC lean since the beginning, not sure why you're so convinced we should have gotten him.
Reeves was by no means a can't miss. You're grasping for straws here.
The only one who was ever considered a can't miss was Pryor, and look what happened there. He completely screwed over OSU. 99% of Mich fans are glad we missed on him. He was also the previous coaching regime.
You really need to pick better examples, which you can't really as of now, because there aren't any. Hoke has done a tremendous job recruiting.
Who are the 1% of us who wish T. Pryor had committed to us?
Lots of these 5* players don't always pan out - recruiting services hype kids to the moon at times, and they don't always pan out. The reason LSU and Alabama do so well is in part because of recruiting (and massive oversigning), but also because they have a system in place that methodically develops talented kids into talented stars. That's what Hoke and co. seem to be doing, and that's the type of success I want to see at UM, not just great recruiting classes. Heck, FSU has been pulling in great classes for most of the decade and look where that has led them? Player development is at least as important as player acquisition.
Do yourself (and us) a favor. Stop following recruiting. You're trying to keep score in a way that makes no sense and you're never going to be happy.
... It's officially time to freak the F out.... or win a National Championship and start turning all the 4-stars down.
Methinks you're confusing "can't miss" with "really good prospect" or "player for whom Michigan is a prohibitive favorite."
Su'a Cravens is a really good player. But we are in good shape at his position, and he was a longshot to leave the west coast. If that's the definition of a can't miss for Michigan, we're proper screwed.
No doubt, hoke's a great recruiter.
but the fact of the matter is that some truly elite players are still reluctant to join hokeamania...especially when we are in a 50-50, 40-60 type of odds with another school in the mix
i am getting a tad bit tired of the garnetts, isaacs, cravens etc. HOKEfully we beat some 'elite' school soon for a recruits services.
You must chill.
For real. I'm sick of having the best recruiting class in the nation. We should be ranked at LEAST -12.
Further proof that some high school kids don't deserve the internet...
It was touch and go for a while during the UMxGoNightgames days, but you turned it around. We can only hope for the same from Mr.Mario.
Once we start having multiple players drafted in the first 2 rounds of the draft the top 25 prospects will notice and we'll start pulling 2 or so per year. Its no secret that there hasn't been a lot of NFL talent the last 5 years, save for Graham, Mesko and Martin, plus I think Molk and Hemingway will be good NFL players. But the kids in the top 25 want first round money and they believe that USC and 'Bama can give it to them.
Did you really think we had a chance to land him? I get the feeling from this post you don't really follow/understand UM recruiting very much.
Well that was a scintillating discourse.
Don't sleep on USC's academics. It's a really good school with a passionate alumni base. One of my good friends has degrees from UCLA and USC, and he fervently believes USC has the best connected and helpful alumni base in California and the western US in general. Cravens could do much, much worse from an educational standpoint.
Kiffin is a demonstrated tool, but he's done really well to keep USC up as the pain from sanctions start to kick in. It will be really interesting to see what happens after this season there, but things have gone really well so far.
Ohio would be much worse.
Your friend's homerism is shining through.
You can count on one hand the schools in the world (Harvard...maybe Oxford) that have more resources, prestigious alumni, and brand recognition than those wacky Trees.
Last I checked, Palo Alto was still a part of California.
PS A colleague was an undergrad and went to medical school out in Stanford. He had a freaking medical device patent on his resume. Part of their med school curriculum was to pair together medical students, biomedical engineer PhDs, and MBAs to figure out the need for a product, create said product, and then market that product. On the school's dime.
I wasn't talking about quite the same thing. His feeling was that USC alumni looked out for each other and really cared about seeing other USC folks succeed. Stanford's status as one of the truly elite universities in the world isn't in question, but that very status goes hand in hand with a dispersed alumni base that doesn't have the concentration in California that a less excellent school might have.
Either way, Stanford is pretty sweet and has a much better campus than USC--although it's a little too isolated from Palo Alto for me.
USC is ranked by USNWR 23 to our 28. Ever been in Ann Arbor in the winter?
While I hate to lose any recruit, there are certain realites you have to face and that is that Michigan does have competition from other schools which sometimes have excellent academics, better climate and equally good coaching. The fact of the matter is that you can get great educations at many schools, and a lot of very highly ranked players are looking toward the NFL, not schoolbooks.
And it's not just about a possible commitment... getting him on campus improves Michigan's image in California where it would be nice to make some recruiting inroads. Remember when Mathis talked up Michigan so much and all of a sudden, several elite west coast guys were talking about their interest in Michigan. Have any of them panned out? Not yet... but it's about building those relationships and improving word-of-mouth.
So even if Cravens would have never commited to Michigan, not getting him on campus is a disappointment.
(although he probably will), it's really, really discouraging to see USC seeming to not be affected at all by the NCAA punishment recruiting-wise. They seem to be signing HS All-Americans like nothing ever happened. If there ever was a more arrogant program in terms of thumbing their nose collectively at the system of rules in college football, I'd like to see it. I guess they've been successful in convincing a lot of recruits that they've changed their spots.