Michigan Football Recruiting: Mailbag Question — Ohio State and Recruiting

Posted at 6:00am — 7/11/2008

Michigan Football Recruiting: Mailbag Question — Ohio State and Recruiting

In regards to Ohio State and Michigan recruiting.

How do you think both teams are doing with recruiting and also their ability to fill their needs.

Also what do you think of Ohio State already having most of their kids in the class of 2009. Are you worried of your a osu fan that they might miss on a kid or that he doesn’t work out since he has a whole school year to go and football season. Hard to look at those kids that pop up during their senior year.

What about Michigan, because I know you guys have worried about the recruiting in the past. What about now? Where do they need to go after and what is a position that they need to just be done with and move on.

Thanks,
Rick

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GBMWolverine Response:

In our opinion, Ohio State class is very good on both fronts you asked about if it fills their needs. It definitely fills Ohio State needs. If you check Ohio State roster you will see a need for defensive linemen, offensive linemen, and defensive backs. Ohio State will lose a large number of players at these positions.

This class has good depth and quality at these three areas. Therefore, we give Ohio State staff props for filling needs. The only negative we see in filling needs is still thinking Ohio State needs a quarterback in this class.

Ohio State also has done a good job of defending their base recruiting territory. The state of Ohio will always be priority #1 for Ohio State as long as Coach Tressell is in charge.

As for all the early commits, couple of issues In our opinion:
1) Is simple, Ohio State identified a number of players they liked. When Ohio State offered, they accepted.
2) Is a couple of other programs, especially Illinois under Coach Zook, have made the decision to make a huge push into Ohio. They offered kids early and forced Ohio State into some decisions they would have probably preferred to make later. Only time will tell us if they did right thing or not.

Being this full with commits at this early date does lessen a team’s margin for error. We have to give Ohio State staff the benefit at this time, their history for identifying and developing talent has been very good.

As for Michigan, nothing has changed. We think Michigan has done a good job at recruiting skill position players who fit Coach Rod’s system. We just wish we would see Michigan recruiting the defensive side of the ball with same intensity as the skill positions.

In addition, yes, we realize it is just July and long way to February. However, if you check the boards you see an awful lot of real nice looking defensive prospects coming off the board fast.

Moreover, if you had watched spring ball and seen the drop off from Michigan’s first group to the second group we really think you would share our concern.

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Written by GBMWolverine Staff

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