U of M Football Class of '17 (Blog Post #4)

This weeks blog post, I am going to discuss Michigan's incoming football class. Running a prestigious football program takes a lot of work and is a long difficult process. One of the major keys to having a good football team is to obviously have talented players. And to bring talented high school football players to your university, you have to recruit them.

Thankfully, we have the most creative recruiter in the country, Jim Harbaugh, our head coach. Jim came to Michigan 2 years ago after being fired as the head coach for the San Fransisco 49ers. And a  fun fact that is commonly unknown is that Jim is a Alumni for U of M and used to play football for the Wolverines. Throughout the offseason, Jim accumulated a lot of 'drama' by his peers for his  unique recruiting techniques. Coach Harbaugh is willing to do anything to get a recruit he wants. He even spent the night at a high school kickers house to get the player to sign with Michigan. In his visit, he was shown babysitting the recruits brother and climbing a tree in their front yard. A more practical thing that Jim did to get another recruit was hire his father and high school head coach to Michigan's coaching staff.

So far for the class of 2017, Coach Harbaugh has accumulated 17 players to verbally commit to the Maize & Blue. Which include ten 4-star ranked players, seven 3-star players, and 7 players ranked in the ESPN Top 300. Some notable names from this list include Dylan McCaffrey, the Heisman hopeful running back from Stanford U's brother, and Luiji Vilain, this 6th ranked wide receiver in the country. Other impacting players that are leaning towards committing to Michigan include the #1 ranked receiver in the country, and Detroit native, Donovan Peoples-Jones and the #1 overall player in the country Trey Smith, a 6-6 300 pound OT.

Jim is by far a character, but he also is one of the most innovative and brilliant head coaches on a football field right now. He has stretched the rules and taken big shots to do whats needed to be done to acquire top name recruits for the Wolverines. From having slumber parties with young men to hosting questionable satellite camps at prestigious high schools throughout the nation. For being a unranked team 2 years ago, to where the team is at now, you can say Jim Harbaugh has done a lot of special things for the university. And in future dates to come, I hope more and more recruits realize how great it is to become a Wolverine.

If you would like to keep up on the recruiting class for 2017, here a few links to help:
ESPN Top 300 - http://www.espn.com/college-sports/football/recruiting/playerrankings/_/view/rn300/sort/rank/class/2017
24/7 Sports - http://michigan.247sports.com/Season/2017-Football/Commits