Michigan's spring roster hit yesterday with only one surprise: redshirt sophomore cornerback Benjamin St-Juste was not on it. An insider posted to our message board, and 247’s Steve Lorenz confirmed last night that St-Juste has asked for and received a medical hardship waiver, meaning he can continue to receive financial aid but his career is done (and he no longer counts against the scholarship limit).

It’s a bummer since Michigan liked St-Juste enough his freshman year to go on a tall defensive back recruiting binge in the class after. An unknown Quebecois prospect who flew up the recruiting rankings after appearing at The Opening, St-Juste was the first of the many lengthy, bendy, hip-swingy cornerback prospects that Michigan began recruiting in earnest after the staff saw what Jeremy Clark (or Richard Sherman for the Stanford alums) could do. Michigan spotted the Canadian in the summer of 2015, but St-Juste chose to delay his matriculation to 2017 (Canadian high schools have 13 grades). The 247 and Rivals scouts used that year to catch up, skeptical Scout.com was folded into 247, and that’s how a guy from the land of Emmanuel Casseuses arrived as a 19-year-old composite four-star.

St-Juste was on track to pay that off; he got on the field in 12 games as a freshman in 2017, mostly on special teams as Lavert Hill, David Long, and Brandon Watson dominated playing time, and classmate Ambry Thomas was a more polished true freshman prospect. But St-Juste battled injuries all last season, and apparently that was going to continue.

St-Juste was the tallest and most exciting of his ilk, but thanks to the 2018 class Michigan has more St-Juste-like (Jeremy Clarketypes?) redshirt freshmen on the roster that you can fit in a midsize SUV, plus a pair of more cornerbackian true freshmen and a preferred walk-on (Hunter Reynolds) who was last year’s scout team player of the year to compete behind projected starters Lavert Hill and Ambry Thomas.

He does add to the attrition counter, but not on the bad side of it. St-Juste is just the fifth (Chris Fox, Grant Newsome, Ondre Pipkins, Corey Malone-Hatcher) to be offered a medical scholarship since 2015 (Pipkins chose to forgo his to play at Texas Tech after Michigan’s doctors wouldn’t clear him to play). Including Peters’ all-but announced impending departure, 65 players have left the program with eligibility remaining under Harbaugh. However, and despite this program sharing space with Stanford/Notre Dame for extremely sensitive disciplinary triggers, just 26 players have left without a degree. This leaves Michigan in the odd position of having an extremely high benign (early NFL, degree-and-a-handshake, medical) level of attrition but also an extremely high academic success rate (affected by dismissals and non-grad transfers).