ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
ROAD TO GLORY
RTG-01 · Underdog Run · Week 0
Regional recruiting notebook
Morning. Two hundred eleven of these now. Gratitude to the 41 subscribers who went paid in July; that covered two round trips of gas to Ypsilanti, and that is the whole of the business model.
Season's here. Order of operations: the 2027 quarterbacks, the mailbag, and then one final round of griping about camp season, after which I will let it go.
A note on method, prompted by the inbox: this list is my board. It does not mirror 247, it does not mirror On3, and it is not a tally of "who holds offers." It is the players I have personally watched, live or across a full game of tape, ranked by who I would take. Every name here I have seen in the flesh at least once, save a single exception, and I name that exception.
Also getting looks: Cam Rittenour of Zeeland East; Josiah Ferreira of Warren De La Salle, who may well end up at safety; Trey Winkelman of Midland Dow.
| Player | June | Now | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marcus Dill | 1 | 1 | Nothing moves him. Nothing has ever moved him. |
| Beckett Hoyle | 3 | 2 ▲ | Threw well at two camps. Added Air Force. Camps explain the entire gap, and I want that on the record. |
| Amari Whitfield-Ross | 2 | 3 ▼ | Not a knock — Hoyle passed him. Testing still carrying more than tape. |
| Griffin Slate | 4 | 4 | Identical player, identical frame, identical ceiling, identical Division II outcome. |
| Devlin Pace | — | 5 ▲ | Added to this board on tape alone — a practice I have publicly criticized and then went ahead and did. |
And yes, I am aware I put Pace on here off film immediately after two paragraphs insisting I never do that. He grades as a preferred-walk-on prospect out of a program I trust, which is a far lower bar than asserting somebody belongs in the top five. It is still a double standard. Someone is going to write in about the inconsistency and they will have a point.
| Player | Pos | School | Committed to | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deshaun Brackens | DL | Detroit King | Michigan | June. Locked. |
| Colton Vanderweele | OT | Hudsonville | Michigan State | July. Soft — three staffs still calling. |
| Amari Whitfield-Ross | QB | Detroit King | — | Says spring. Will not be spring. |
| Marcus Dill | QB | Belleville | — | December. Big Ten. That's the whole board. |
| Beckett Hoyle | QB | Rockford | — | Taking all five officials. Sensible kid. |
| Chase Lynch | EDGE | Fenton | — | No offers yet. He will hold three offers by January and I would put money on it. |
Ken, some version of this arrives four times a year and I am going to answer it properly this time instead of being flip, because the flip answer has started to bother me.
I did look it up. Thirty-five and zero, seventy-five percent, 850 rushing. Those figures are accurate, they match the Tri-County box scores, and they are terrific figures.
Here's my honest problem. There are five names on that board and I watched four of them play in person. That is the entire standard I keep, and it is the only reason this thing has been worth publishing two hundred eleven times. I have not seen Fenton play. Fenton did not make my fall calendar because Belleville, King, Rockford, Muskegon and roughly nine Detroit-area Fridays already fill it, and a season contains a finite number of Fridays.
So the answer is: I don't know, and I am not comfortable with not knowing. I'm not going to pretend those numbers are uninteresting. I'm also not putting a kid on a quarterback board off a stat line and a cutup, because that is precisely how this industry gets things wrong in both directions, and I have been wrong in both directions.
My answer is the one I always give. Flint Metro does not get scouted. The kid is listed at 149
on a sheet that was printed in June. No camps, so no verified height and no verified time. He got
hurt in week nine, so there is no postseason film in existence. Every one of those is a reason a
college staff moves to the next name on the list, not one of them is his fault, and all of them
are entirely real.
One thing I will add, because a reader in Fenton sent me the school paper and I read the
whole thing. That kid has apparently sent twelve emails to college programs himself since June,
with no help from anybody, and two coaches wrote back. If that's accurate then he has done more
actual recruiting work than most of the players on my board, alone, at seventeen, and it has
produced nothing, and I do not have a comfortable thing to say about that.
Should Fenton sit at 5–0 come October and somebody puts full-game film in my inbox — full game, not cutups — I'll watch it. That's not a brush-off. That's what I'd tell anybody.
Chase Lynch, edge, Fenton. Since we're on Fenton. Six-four, long-limbed, bends the edge, and rushes with an actual plan rather than sprinting straight upfield. Eastern has come through twice, Ferris has made contact, and my view is that both are underselling him. He's a MAC starter. Some program is going to sign a steal in December.
Denise, further than anyone working in this field will admit in public. So here is the math rather than my opinion.
Some of it is money and the money is real for plenty of families. Registration, gas, a hotel if it is Bowling Green, a parent giving up a workday. Four camps in a summer is an ordinary number for a recruited kid and it is not free.
But if you make me pick one, it is not the money and it is not close. It is the information. Money you can save for, borrow, fundraise, or get embarrassed into asking about. Nobody has ever been embarrassed into asking about a thing they do not know exists.
I have talked to families with money who missed the entire window because not one adult in their life ever mentioned there was a window. I have talked to families with nothing whose kid got seen because a seven-on-seven coach made two phone calls. The gap in this sport is not a bank balance. It is whether somebody in your house has done this before.
Some do. Most don't. The ones who do are MAC and FCS position coaches reading at eleven o'clock on a July night out of boredom, and they represent the most under-discussed way into this sport.
If you were mine, this is the advice I would give. A recruiting-service blast is worth nothing. Blasting forty programs at once accomplishes nothing. A single message, to a single position coach, at a single program that genuinely fits, demonstrating you know their scheme and posing a real question about it — that one comes back maybe once every fifteen tries. One in fifteen sounds dismal until you notice it is an actual opening and the alternatives are walls.
Send fifteen. Write all fifteen yourself.
| Program | What changed | Why you care |
|---|---|---|
| Ball State | Craig Harmon elevated to pass game coordinator while keeping the quarterback room | Known for taking small, accurate, high-processing quarterbacks. Answers his own email. Genuinely watches film people send him. |
| Wyoming | Christian Taylor OC/QBs, second year | Necessity forces him to recruit coast to coast, which means a name from anywhere will get a look. Will quiz you. |
| CMU | New OC, third in four years | Board is a mess. Nobody there knows what they want yet. |
| EMU | Stable | Signs exactly one Michigan quarterback per cycle and it is nearly always somebody from a camp. |
| GVSU / Ferris / Hillsdale | — | The three sharpest evaluators working at any level in Michigan, and I am not entertaining objections. |
I promised one complaint and then silence. Here it is.
Of the five quarterbacks ranked above, three received their first offer within two days of a camp. Not after a game. After a camp — some morning in June where a coach spent ninety minutes watching them throw in shorts and walked away with a verified height and a laser-timed forty.
That is the actual gate. Not film, not production, not winning. Standing in front of somebody in June.
Camp attendance sorts by whose family can afford the fee, whose seven-on-seven outfit is friendly with the organizer, and whose high school coach has the right phone number. None of that is corruption; it is simply the shape of the funnel. And still, every autumn I turn up somebody in October who was clearly better than a June signee, and every autumn that October kid has nowhere to go because the boards closed months ago.
Every year I find a player in October who was plainly better than somebody who got offered in June, and every year the October player is out of luck, because by October the boards are full of names that were on them before anyone played a game.
Anyway. Friday. Go and watch a football game. — Wes Trombley
Wes Trombley writes The Mitten Board; he has covered Michigan prep football since 2011 and is attached to no recruiting service. The free edition includes the board and the mailbag. Subscribers additionally receive film notes and the Friday night live thread. 1,340 subscribers.