Clik here to view.
Welcome to The Crootletter. I'm Bud Elliott, SB Nation's National Recruiting Analyst, and in this space I'll be sharing news, rumors and musings on the world of college football recruiting.
Michigan dropped another recruit Monday night, bringing the Wolverines' count to more than a handful of these instances and two in a week. The exact circumstances around this decommitment won't be known because the school cannot speak on the record about its position due to NCAA rules about discussing recruits, but the recruit paints a familiar, unflattering picture of Michigan's staff being less than forthcoming with commitments.
I've been consistent in my approach to schools dropping recruits: it's all dependent on appropriate notice. If a school tells a prospect in November, that's fine because the kid (emphasis on kid) is being given time to form relationships with other schools and take a full allotment of official visits. Similarly, if a school tells a prospect that he needs to do something by a certain date to be in the class -- be it raise his GPA to a level after the fall semester, lose bad weight, or attain a test score -- and he fails to do it by the agreed upon date, dropping him is fine by me, too.
But what doesn't work for me is when a school strings a prospect along and then drops him very late in favor of a more talented player, giving him an unreasonably small window to make the biggest choice of his life to date.
I often hear the refrain on social media that kids drop schools all the time, so schools should be able to drop them. But the key word here is kids. Kids are going to act like kids, but schools are run by adults and should act like it.
Michigan's standards are now just like any other football school
But it is certainly done by all the schools who are serious about winning national titles. When Michigan agreed to pay Harbaugh $7 million per year, it signaled that it wanted to be one of those teams. And Harbaugh cannot beat those teams while riding on the high horse some Michigan fans still think the school still sits upon. That means cutting kids from the class and from the existing roster to create more room, and it means taking academically questionable entrants -- the same kids SEC schools worry about getting qualified. Will Michigan fans be cool with having the same standards as Ohio State or Alabama? I think Harbaugh's alumni status will give him leeway in this area that Rich Rodriguez did not receive a decade ago.
An early signing day would curb this nonsense
Something that would help kids a lot would be an early signing period. I wrote about this idea a few months ago, but it doesn't look like it will happen soon. But an early signing period would have absolutely made Jim Harbaugh and other coaches think twice before offering some of the prospects they later decided to drop, because if the player elected to sign with the school early, he would be locked in to the class. Do you think Jim Harbaugh would have thrown out the offers that brought so much publicity to Michigan during his summer satellite camp tour if an early signing period existed? Me neither.
An early signing period would also drastically curb the practices of carpet bombing a region with hundreds of offers, and it would slow the number of "non-committable" offers. If someone can officially commit to an offer you give out, you must be sure that you could live with taking that prospect.
If a school isn't talking to you, talk to someone else
I had a conversation with a popular 2017 prospect last night who felt terrible for Weaver. And after we chatted, the kid said that he now realizes that Weaver should have seen this coming because Michigan had little to no contact with him. But kids are always rookies to the recruiting process, so they don't see it.
So, if you are a recruit, parent or coach, let me lay this out for you: schools do not play hard to get. If they are not talking to you, even if you are committed to them, they are not that interested in you. That doesn't mean that you will be dropped, or that an offer will not come, but it does likely mean that they have better options and that you need to actively secure a backup plan.
Quickly
- How does BYU's recruiting compare to the rest of its schedule?
- Stanford had a big recruiting weekend.
- TCU landed an offensive tackle, who was being pursued by a lot of elite programs down the home stretch.
- Hugh Freeze landed a Florida speedster.
* * *