Michigan Football Has Itself To Blame For Aubrey Solomon Decommitment
In an evolving recruiting world, Michigan football forgot the basics—keeping tabs and spelling names correctly—and now it only has itself to blame.
Jim Harbaugh is a lot of things: confident, brash, ruthless, weird, and efficient. One thing he’s not? Sloppy. Nevertheless, sloppiness just cost Michigan football four-star 2017 defensive tackle Aubrey Solomon.
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Solomon, a 6-foot-4, 284-pound bruiser from Leesburg, Georgia, committed to Michigan after attending a satellite camp in his hometown. Then he decommitted from Michigan after an easily avoidable gaffe by the coaching staff.
Recruits like Solomon are exactly why Harbaugh and company were willing to take so much heat after setting up shop in SEC country this summer. All of the schools that are recruiting Solomon lie below the Mason Dixon line, save U of M and Ohio State. Nabbing Solomon was a solid get, and while losing him isn’t a disaster, it is still incredibly frustrating.
For those of you who haven’t heard the full story, the program held a barbecue at Michigan Stadium to either impress or celebrate recruits, depending on the level of commitment. Solomon did not attend said event, yet he received a “Thank You” letter from the coaching staff for attending.
That’s the only information about the content of the letter, which is bad enough on its own, but I’m guessing it was probably also padded with some kind words about how great it was to have him there and how important it was to the staff and other recruits to get to know him better, etc., which just makes it more cringeworthy.
Oh yeah, and according to Solomon, Michigan misspelled both of his names!
Before we get too far into what—if any—impact this will have for the program, I want to take a moment to mention the fact that Solomon said the note was “heartbreaking.” That’s probably the most disappointing thing here: the program’s seeming indifference to a 17-year-old kid who had already committed (meaning he had developed relationships with at least two coaches) and dreamed of attending the University of Michigan.
At a university that holds community and loyalty in such high regard that it invented the term “Michigan Man,” this is a particularly ironic blunder.
All of that said, in a vacuum, this isn’t a huge deal. My guess is that some poor grad assistant had to send out a form letter to everyone that attended the barbecue and just included one name too many to the mailing list after a long night of licking envelopes.
In the often insane, always brutal, and sometimes dirty world of recruiting, though, this is not great.
Harbaugh may seem like a maniac—and in many ways he is, obviously—but when it comes to recruiting, he’s always very calculated. His antics on the recruiting trail are often ridiculous but always seem to garner attention and charm the recruit and his parents. His Twitter account and his interviews sometimes make it seem like he home-brews Red Bull moonshine, but it’s almost always part of a plan and a carefully manicured public image.
This mistake flies in the face of that. I’m quite sure that the second-year coach wasn’t directly involved in Lettergate, but this is going to cause some pain for Harbaugh and his staff. A stupid, ironic mistake like this is just too easy for the likes of Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, et al. to use again and again when recruiting against Michigan.
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Solomon still has Michigan on his list, so hopefully that grad assistant can spell his name correctly on his field pass.