Michigan Football: Good vibes with Junior Colson, possibly out on Buddin

Linebacker has been a really interesting position to follow this recruiting cycle for Michigan football and here’s the latest on a couple of recruits.

Sort of like the offensive line, Michigan football has been targeting a bunch of different linebackers this recruiting cycle and could end up with four or five easy once it’s all said and done.

Of course, Michigan football fans continue to hope that one of the players the Wolverines will get at linebacker is four-star Junior Colson, a standout from Tennessee that is strongly considering U-M along with in-state UT.

Colson ranks as one of the top outside linebackers in the nation in the 2021 class, coming in 10th according to the 247 sports composite rankings, as well as 128th overall. He’s the second-best player in his home state and the Vols, who have been on a roll lately, are pushing hard for him.

But, according to the Michigan Insider’s Steve Lorenz ($), the Wolverines still have a good shot at landing the highly-touted linebacker:

"“It definitely looks to be coming down to Michigan and Tennessee if Colson sticks to his current timeline, which is a potential decision sometime this month. If he does decide this month, my confidence is growing that Michigan will be the choice.”"

Colson is a guy that’s described as a future NFL linebacker, who can play coverage. Yet, he also notched 14 sacks last season, so he could be a SAM, sort of like Josh Uche.

While Michigan still seems to be in a solid position with Colson and some others such as Jaydon Hood, who got a crystal ball last week, things seem to be heading in the other direction with four-star linebacker Jamari Buddin, one of the top players in the state of Michigan from Belleville.

Buddin is really solid recruit and Michigan has been after for him a while now, even holding all of his crystal ball picks at one point. But recently, that started to change. Penn State started to make a move for Buddin and then Michigan State started gaining ground.

Michigan definitely seemed to be losing momentum and on his Instagram account Thursday, Buddin supposedly said that the Wolverines are no longer recruiting him, which may or may not be true.

What was true is that Michigan really wanted Buddin at one point. Now, things seemed to have cooled off and while Buddin can say the Wolverines don’t want him, if they have stopped pushing for him, it’s probably more about an allocation of resources.