coach senescence

RIP Blazefire. Michigan and MGoBlog has lost Blazefire84 at the far-too-young age of 35. Here is his obituary; here is the board thread. Blazefire was a good guy, and a good internet person. The latter is so very hard. He'll be missed.

Good news tomorrow? The Army All American Bowl is tomorrow at 1 PM, and Michigan will have a hat on the table for CA CB Darion Green-Warren. Green-Warren has already signed and is announcing a choice that's already locked in, so in this case the tea leaves are pretty easy to read and point towards Michigan, which has 94% of the crystal balls. Might be worth tuning in.

Green-Warren is a top 200 prospect at a position where Michigan could use some reinforcements. USC is the other main player in his recruitment, and we've detailed USC's stunningly bad recruiting multiple times.

Draft entry o'clock. Now is the time when people get serious about making draft decisions. So far for Michigan, Josh Uche and Sean McKeon have foregone potential fifth years and accepted Senior Bowl invites while Kwity Paye and Nick Eubanks have announced returns. Other potential departures:

• WR Nico Collins: Isaiah Hole reports he's hearing Collins is leaning towards a return. Most other chatter has held similarly.
• WR Donovan Peoples-Jones: There's a lot of wobble in DPJ projections in what's going to be a loaded WR draft. The Athletic's Dane Brugler made it sound like he was a mid-round pick despite ranking him in the top 10 WRs; he's the first pick of the second round in Matt Miller's mock draft. There hasn't been much word on which way he's leaning.
• C Cesar Ruiz: Ruiz's draft evals are even more all over the board than DPJ's, with a lot of blue checkmarks on twitter having him in the fourth or fifth route while Tony Pauline has him as a late first rounder. When asked about the NFL in a press conference before the bowl game Ruiz gave the standard "thinking about Future Opponent" answer with no elaboration.
• CB Ambry Thomas: Thomas hasn't put it on Twitter but in a bowl press scrum he said "You can just assume I’m coming back." He did leave a little bit of post-bowl wiggle room; I don't think he had a paradigm-shifting Citrus Bowl. I'd assume that he sticks with his original decision. As of the 28th he hadn't submitted his name for a draft grade.

If I had to guess I'd say Michigan loses Ruiz and gets everyone else back. Losing Tarik Black to a transfer is a bummer but if Michigan gets their top two WRs back that's much better than I was expecting.

FWIW, our speculation that the guys who played in the 78-0 Rutgers game back in the day still could get redshirts, a group that included McKeon, does appear to have a proof of concept in Carlo Kemp. Sam Webb reports that Michigan is "confident" he will be granted a redshirt year after appearing in two games as a true freshman.

[After THE JUMP: do you like dated stuff? Because I have lots of it.]