It's been a little while since we checked in on Michigan Football recruiting, not since the bye week roughly seven weeks ago. The second-half of the season has consumed most of our time with content, but now getting a break before the Fiesta Bowl, it's time to check back in on recruiting, especially with the early signing day coming up very soon. This piece will go over recent updates on the 2023 class, talk about the remaining targets, check in quickly on 2024, and then move into a long monologue about the state of recruiting and answer some pressing questions you may have. One more note: next week I'll begin pumping out Hellos for all the kids we've missed, so that is coming soon. 

 

Recent Updates on 2023 

Well, a lot has happened since the last update, so let's try and get everyone up to speed. You can classify this into two categories, the good and the bad: 

BAD

• Michigan lost out on several OT prospects they liked, Spencer Fano and Caleb Lomu, both of whom opted to stay out west. OG DJ Chester also chose to stay in the south, picking LSU 
• Top Michigan DT target Kayden McDonald picked Ohio State over Michigan 
• Top Michigan CB target Chris Peal picked Georgia over Michigan 
• EDGE Commit Collins Acheampong flipped to Miami from Michigan 

GOOD 

• Michigan nabbed 3* OG Nathan Efobi from the Atlanta area, a prospect some see as high as the top 150 range, while others rate much lower 
• Michigan flipped 3* CB Cameron Calhoun from Cincinnati, beating out Kentucky in the process 
• Michigan has made additional in-roads into Ohio, picking up 3* LB Breeon Ishmail from Cincinnati and 3* defensive ATH Jason Hewlett from Youngstown 

The bad was not terribly surprising outside of the Acheampong flip, which was fueled by a messy personal life situation that fueled Acheampong's desire to seek a more NIL-friendly school. Fano and Lomu picking Utah was more geographic and religious-focused than anything else and the others were lost to schools who have much more to offer financially... for several reasons, Michigan is not winning many battles against other blue blood programs (something I'll dig into later). 

The good was decent. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but Michigan has begun making more in-roads into Ohio than they have at any point since Brady Hoke was the coach by picking up Ishmail, Calhoun, and Hewlett. They still have another Ohio target on the board in D'Juan Waller, but these pickups seem to be laying the groundwork for a strong push into the Buckeye State for 2024. Calhoun in particular is a prospect I like and Hewlett has pretty high upside. If we're talking about guys to take chances on, these aren't the worst ideas. As for Efobi, he is a prospect that is pretty divisive among the rankings services but I defer to Sherrone Moore's judgement. This staff has earned that right. 

In the national rankings, the class sits 22nd to On3 and 19th to 24/7. Why is this lower than we want? Keep reading and I'll get into that later. But first, a look at the targets left on the board. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: Closing 2023, targets in 2024, and what's up with NIL?]

 

Jyaire Hill [247Sports]

Remaining 2023 Targets

With under two weeks to early signing day, Michigan still has a number of players they're looking at and trying to nail down to complete the 2023 recruiting class. Some of these targets will spill over into the late period but they're going to try and land as many as possible that they deem "takes". Michigan seems set at QB (taking no one, though ATH Kendrick Bell may start there), RB, and TE, while they keep looking around at prospects at the other positions. Here's a quick run through of the remaining targets: 

Wide Receiver: 

• Karmello English (4*): Auburn decommit who Michigan likes a lot and seem to be towards the top with. Big question is whether he'll leave the south. 
• Chance Fitzgerald (3*): Likely the backup plan if things don't go well with English 

Offensive Line: 

• Taliafi Ta'ala (3*): After losing out on Lomu and Fano, a big question is whether Michigan will push to add a fourth OL to the class or keep portal shopping. If they do push for a fourth OL, Ta'ala seems like the most likely, and a very winnable recruitment 

Defense Line: 

• Jamel Howard (3*): An underrated DL who decommitted from Wisconsin after the coaching turmoil, Howard looked to be an easy pickup for the Wolverines but more suitors are getting in the race. This one may go to the late period  
• Roderick "Trey" Pierce (3*): Similar story to Howard, also a Wisconsin DL decommit who Michigan was considered the early favorite for when the recruitment re-opened, Pierce is vetting several options before making a decision 
• Cameron Brandt (4*): Stanford commit who the Wolverines are starting to poke around on in the aftermath of David Shaw's firing. If he visits campus, that's the time to watch out ($)

Defensive back: 

• Aaron Gates (3.5*): Michigan has been trying to flip this Florida commit forever and now we're in the final stages of finding out whether this will happen. He's the #1 option at nickel in this class 
• Jyaire Hill (4*): Michigan's top CB target since Chris Peal picked Georgia, Hill is a legit prospect who would be a massive win. It's been a contentious battle with in-state Illinois and is down to the wire 
• D'Juan Waller (3*): Another Youngstown kid, BFF of Michigan commit Jason Hewlett. Diamond-in-the-rough DB who could play safety or be a tall corner, battle between M and Kentucky right now 

Athlete 

• Nyckoles Harbor (5*): The crown jewel recruitment will go well into the late period as Harbor weighs Michigan against several SEC schools, with a strong eye towards his track career in addition to his football career
• Malachi Coleman (4*): Top 100 Nebraska commit who is looking around after Frost's firing, reportedly planning to visit Michigan. Harbaugh's staff was a bit unclear of his position, but he could be a take as an EDGE to replace Acheampong if he were to commit. May go to the late period 

These are the main targets I've been tracking, but there are others committed to other schools that Michigan may be trying to flip behind the scenes that will pop up in the final days. The biggest priorities seem to be landing one more WR and then beefing up the DL and DB classes, both of which are rather thin right now. A best case scenario finish for the early period sees Michigan nail down one or two defensive linemen, land one of the two receivers, flip Gates and pick up Hill and Waller. It will not be the prettiest class in the world, but it will still have some prospects I am really high on. 

 

Luke Hamilton [On3]

2024 Happenings 

So far things seem to be much better with the 2024 class, although it is still in its infancy. Michigan already has a trio of top 300 commits, LB Mason Curtis from the summer, OG Luke Hamilton, who committed the day after The Game, and TE Hogan Hansen, who committed yesterday. There is another group of prospects who Michigan is in good standing with, none bigger than 5* QB Jadyn Davis. Michigan has been courting Davis for months and the expectation was that he would commit after his HS football season ended. His season ended a few weeks back but we are still waiting on a commitment. With Clemson on the periphery, the big thing here is to get Davis committed by the end of the year. If this bleeds into 2023, it's time to start looking at other options. Michigan cannot afford another Dante Moore, where they go all-in on one guy and come up empty. Nailing down Davis/figuring out the QB question is the single biggest story in the 2024 recruiting class. 

If they can get Davis in the class, then thing begins preceding in a pretty straightforward manner and are looking pretty up. Getting a QB helps build momentum and Michigan's board is lined with other sought-after prospects they seem to be in good position with. This starts with in-state Top 300 players like S Jacob Oden and TE Brady Prieskorn, both of whom are very winnable recruitments. They are also in good position with Ohio's Brian Robinson (EDGE) and Ben Roebuck (OT), who are in or around the Top 300 range. The OL board in particular looks pretty strong, and Michigan also has leads at WR with I'Marion Stewart and Channing Goodwin, both of whom are in the 4* to 3.5* range. The 2024 class does, at this point, undeniably look to be set up better than the 2023 class in terms of projection. That does not mean that there aren't issues in football recruiting to be handled. How good 2024 is likely hinges on getting some of those issues sorted. 

 

[Eric Upchurch]

A monologue about the current state of Michigan Football's recruiting

I wanted to put a long section together talking about Michigan Football recruiting as a whole and my thoughts on the situation, because there have been plenty of takes shared across the internet in recent weeks. I did a long tweet thread on this subject last week and this will be a more comprehensive version of that. I want to preface it by saying that I know nothing more about recruiting than a Michigan fan who subscribes to the paid insider sites. I read those like everyone else and have no additional information. I don't have recruiting sources and I am not a recruiting insider myself. What I will write is simply my assessment of the situation as someone who reads the various paid outlets religiously as part of my job. 

The Michigan 2023 recruiting class is simply not up to program standards and there's no way to put lipstick on that pig. I'm not saying there won't be gems in the class, or that there aren't commits I like. There are. But we can't sit here and pretend that this class isn't a step below where Michigan had been in the preceding four recruiting classes (2019-22), the four that make up the meat of this current team. I'm not a "recruiting stars are everything" guy like Ari Wasserman- I think that sort of rhetoric is tiring at best and foolish at worst. There's more to building a football team than just recruiting 4 or 5* players. But to win at the level Michigan is currently winning at, yes you need 4 and 5* players. 

I like to think of college football recruiting like a graph. On one axis you have "recruiting talent" and the other axis is labeled "coaching/development/systems". In order to make the playoff and truly compete for a national title year in and year out, you need some combination of both. If you have just talented players, you are USC from the years 2010-2020, an incoherent mess that is far less than the sum of its parts, stumbling to 6-6. If you have only great coaches but no talent, you are Michigan State under Dantonio from 2010-2015, a very good team that wins a lot but has a brutally hard ceiling that doesn't allow you to truly compete with the big dogs (see: CFP vs. Alabama in 2015). 

[Bryan Fuller]

Michigan has proved over the last two seasons that with this current crew of coaches led by Jim Harbaugh, they do not need top five talent to be neck-and-neck with Ohio State and make the playoff. They can attain that by sitting in the 8-12 range of the national recruiting rankings, as they did over the past four seasons (10, 12, 13, 12). Harbaugh's staff has proven to be good enough at scouting and development to get top five level output out of classes that aren't quite that highly rated by the scouting services. 

Which is why it's notable that this 2023 class is not in that range, and is not particularly close. Perhaps if everything goes exactly to plan to close out the cycle, it might get to #15, but still below what Michigan is looking for. We can't sit here and say "stars don't matter!" because they do. Anyone who watched the B1G Championship Game and saw the dominating performances of JJ McCarthy, Donovan Edwards, and Will Johnson, all of whom were 5* recruits to at least one scouting service, should know that. Stars aren't everything, but you gotta have some highly rated kids to win big. That's a fact of college football and has been for a very long time. 

So what's going on with 2023, especially when many expected it to be even better than a typical Harbaugh class, given that it was coming off of a playoff appearance? There are a few items to discuss on this subject. First of all, it's important to point out that recruits do not watch the same amount of college football that we do. This is the biggest thing that people get wrong about football recruiting. The top HS athletes in America are not CFB sickos like us. They don't know what year a program is 9th in SP+ vs. 4th in SP+. Recruiting is much more about vibes than on-field success. Winning helps the vibes, especially if it elevates your program's image, but Michigan's brand and image was already very strong despite never beating Ohio State. It was reasonable to expect gains in recruiting, but those who just expected that winning on the field would magically make Michigan #1 in the recruiting rankings were naive and uninformed about what matters to 16 and 17 year old kids. 

[Patrick Barron]

What definitely did hurt the 2023 class, and this can be seen in relation to the 2024 class, which, in its early stages, appears set up to be far better than 2023, was the staff shakeup that occurred in January of this year, just as things were getting going for '23. Losing both coordinators and shuffling positional coaches ruptured relationships, which do matter a good deal for recruiting especially if you are a program that is choosing to recruit the way Michigan is, with words more than $$$ (more on that later). Jim Harbaugh's flirtation with the NFL (and frankly, more than flirtation, a desire to bolt) made things slow out of the gate.

Starting slow creates bad press and unfavorable narratives. By April of this year it was already pervasive in recruiting circles that "Michigan is recruiting badly". That sort of narrative is a double whammy, because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Once recruits hear "Michigan is sucking this cycle/have no good recruits" they have less desire to be a part of that class, thus making it suck more. It creates a snowball that is hard to stop unless you can get a few recruits that change the narrative. Michigan did start to pick up more favorable recruits over the summer months, but the one piece that really could have changed things, say, a 5* QB who everyone believed Michigan would get in the beginning and who Michigan badly wanted, did not commit. That was Detroit's Dante Moore, who never seemed to click or be terribly interested in Michigan, leaning Notre Dame initially and eventually landing with Oregon. Losing Dante hurt majorly and marred some positive in-roads going on in the summer otherwise. 

In other words, Michigan was playing from behind this cycle after stumbling out of the gates from a coaching standpoint. They needed to make up ground, did in some areas, but didn't close with the biggest piece that could have changed things. If you're playing from behind on kids, what's the easiest way to make up ground? The answer of course is to toss some money around. This was true in the pre-NIL era, but as $$$ has become legal, there are dozens of recruitments in which one school leads most of the way, only to have the rug pulled out from under them at the last minute by a school who barely even recruited the kid previously because of the money. How do I know this? Because I've been following recruiting this cycle and have seen that happen to Michigan several times already, with the Wolverines being the team with the rug pulled out from under them. The best way to make up ground was to pull off those sorts of heists, but Michigan will not do so. 

[Bryan Fuller]

Which leads me to NIL. It has become the hottest piece of discussion in Michigan football circles outside of what happens on the field and let's be honest here: Michigan has consistently been behind on NIL this cycle and that is the biggest thing hurting recruiting. Look, I am not an NIL expert. I don't know what Michigan's NIL pitch sounds like or what the best schools are doing. It's something I'd like to do more digging on in the offseason and figure out what exactly is going on because NIL is infuriatingly opaque. But it does not take a recruiting genius to know that what Michigan is doing is behind the curve. You can figure that out every time you go into a recruiting thread and someone asks "why doesn't Michigan go after X prospect?" and EJ Holland responds "NIL" and that's more or less the end of the discussion. 

Michigan's 2023 class is uniquely disappointing due to the convergence of factors I laid out. If there is less staff turnover in January this coming year, 2024 will almost certainly be a better class, and it might approach the Harbaugh standard ranking. But what will hold it back is the same central problem holding back their ability to finish strong in 2023 and it's NIL. NIL. NIL. NIL. The way Michigan is doing things now is not going to get it done in this modern day of age. College sports are dramatically different than they were only a few years prior. JJ McCarthy committed to Michigan in May 2019, less than four years ago, yet the recruiting landscape is a completely different world than it was then. It's like NHL finances before and after the hard salary cap was imposed after the 2005 lockout. A completely different world and old ways will not get it done anymore. Those who cannot see that it is time to adjust will be the ones wearing a dunce cap in only a couple seasons. 

What frustrates me the most about NIL discussions on the internet, be it on message boards or twitter, is that people seem to believe that it is a stark dichotomy, black-and-white. Either schools must do pay-for-play a la Texas A&M or they must do what Michigan is doing, and on the flip side that kids are either Virginal And Noble for not wanting money or WHORES SELLING THEMSELVES TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER. But like nearly every supposed binary, it is a) mostly false and b) not as simple as it makes it seem. 

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

It is your author's opinion that the opimal NIL strategy is neither hardcore pay-for-play nor what Michigan has been doing for the past 18 months. And likewise, most kids in the top 300 of the composite are neither virtuous teetotalers abstaining from the evils of cash nor players who will go to the highest bidder. Some of those kids on either end of the extremes exist, but most football recruits want to go to a good college football program that balances winning/NFL development, school, and the ability to make some money too. 

Michigan has battled Notre Dame for recruits for years, because the kind of kid that goes to Michigan is similar to the one that goes to ND. Typically they'd be within a few slots of each other on the team rankings, with M coming out ahead one year and ND coming out ahead a different year. But what about 2023? While Michigan is mired around #20, Notre Dame boasts the #3 class in the country. Are they going wild with the $$$ like Texas A&M? None of the reporting seems to suggest that, but they have their NIL game in order and Michigan doesn't. If you put yourself in the shoes of a kid choosing between the two, it's not hard to see why. Both are great academic universities, both are big brands with legendary history, and both have been to the CFP within the last three seasons. But one offers a clear and coherent path to make regular income off your profession (let's be frank, it is their job) and the other's plan is more wishcasting and hope than a definitive vision. These kids aren't only in it for the money, but the money does matter and will matter to most all top 300 type kids from here on out. Especially QBs. 

So you can either choose to be Old Man Yells At Cloud or you can live in the year 2022 and get with the modern times. Michigan badly needs to get its NIL program up to speed. What does that look like? Again, I don't know exactly. The reports are that Michigan would like a "base salary" system akin to what some other schools have come up with and that sounds like a fine idea. There just needs to be much more movement towards making that a reality. It seems that NIL pitches towards players currently in college, either those on the team or portal targets, are better than those targeted at recruits right now. Those efforts need to trickle down to he recruiting level, and quickly. Those who follow insider reporting can agree that there have been many months of promises about big changes "coming soon!", but they haven't turned into anything groundbreaking yet. 

[Bryan Fuller]

The loss of Collins Acheampong, related to his family's urgent need for immediate $$$, is something Michigan probably could not have averted even if they get their NIL base salary system up and going. It was a unique situation and isn't something you can extrapolate to all kids. But the pay-for-play programs are lurking and offering all of Michigan's 2023 recruits who are worth anything. I assume the Wolverines will keep most (maybe all!) of those kids in the class, but they can't breathe a sigh of relief until the final bell sounds. In the current landscape, Michigan is low on the food chain despite being #2 in the country on the field, and the carnivores at the top of the food chain come by to see if they can find prey every day. 

I do believe that Michigan will figure it out, and there have been rumblings about meeting(s) taking place between Santa Ono and Warde Manuel to hopefully get things organized on the NIL front. The fact that such a meeting needs to take place, 18 months after NIL was legalized, is an embarrassment for the football program, but it is what it is. Ono is reportedly knowledgeable about NIL and what it takes to succeed and we can only hope that that meeting will bring much quicker movement towards the NIL programs that Michigan desires. The tune of the insiders seems to have changed in recent weeks, from "you'll be excited to see the changes soon!" to a much more dire "things need to change ASAP!", which makes me believe that their sources on the football staff have grown frustrated with the NIL progress of their superiors. The more pressure that the big name coaches put on the athletic department and university administration, the faster things are figured out. I don't have a culprit here to put the blame on, because I'm not that in the know, but whoever the central stumbling blocks are need to be rectified in time for the 2024 recruiting cycle to proceed with minimal NIL pitfalls.   

[Patrick Barron]

Michigan won't let itself suck at football for no reason- they're not going to become Northwestern. Football makes the university far too much money for that to happen. The question is whether changes in leadership are needed to get it figured out, and how much longer it will take. If Michigan can get it figured out in the next couple months, I think they should have the sort of recruiting class in 2024 that is up to program standards (or even slightly better!), especially since the early gains in 2024, even with wobbly NIL, seem quite promising. Harbaugh comfortably stomached one class below program standards in 2018 because they found some gems and got back to normal in 2019. That can happen here with 2023 and 2024, but it requires program organization and continuity on Harbaugh's end *and* a much more coherent NIL strategy moving forward. One that allows them to win battles with other football powers and close on recruits instead of those recruits waiting until the last minute for any new $$$ offers to roll in. 

What I've laid out is somewhere between catastrophic dooming and dismissing NIL problems outright. Michigan football recruiting has a real NIL problem which, if allowed to fester, poses an existential threat to the program's current status as a football powerhouse. However, there are several reasons, from insiders as well as simple logic and intuition, to believe that the doomsday scenario bandied about on On3 message boards by trolls and neurotics is likely not going to come to pass. It's just abundantly frustrating to ever have been in this place to begin with. I don't want to write about how Michigan is late to the party out of a combination of some misplaced sense of moral superiority and incompetence but here we are. From here on out the focus must be on closing 2023 strong and getting things right for 2024 so that no future damage can be done. If Michigan can get their donors in order, and cooperation established with a powerful NIL collective, they have more than enough $$$ to recruit at a high level, even with academics and everything else in mind. But I'm pretty tired of using the word "if".