Michigan State Is Leading Six Recruitments Now, and I Cannot Tell You Whether Any of It Is Real

Michigan State is in front for six players on its own board. Six. Two weeks ago it was in front for none of them, because two weeks ago nothing had come back at all.

Four prospects put the Spartans in a named group this week and every one of those four is understood by the people around him to have Michigan State on top. A fifth is dead even with his hometown school. A sixth has quietly moved from a coin flip to a lean. Three more that Michigan State was behind on are closing.

I have been doing this long enough to be suspicious of a week like that, and I want to say plainly at the top that I do not know what it is. Either Nick Mansour’s staff has found something in how it recruits, or a 28-year-old is very good on the phone and September is when being good on the phone works. Those two things look identical in the middle of September and they stop looking identical in the middle of December.

Nobody I trust can tell them apart yet either, and I asked eleven people.

The number is the story, and the number is the problemSix leaders on a board that had none of them two weeks ago

Here is the thing I keep running into when I try to write about this week responsibly.

Six is not a normal number. A first-year staff at a program that finished outside the top forty in recruiting five years running is supposed to lead for one or two kids in September, both of them local, both of them ranked outside the top three hundred. Michigan State is leading for a top-40 center in California, a top-60 corner in Ohio, a top-100 tackle in Wisconsin, a top-270 defensive tackle whose brother plays on Sundays, a quarterback forty minutes up the road and a three-star safety in Georgia.

That is either the front edge of something or it is what a very persuasive September looks like from the inside.

I want to be precise about what I can and cannot see. What I can see is that the people around these families keep describing the same experience, and it is not the experience they describe with other programs. What I cannot see is whether that experience survives an October when Michigan State loses a game, or a December when Ohio State calls the same kid with a different number attached.

Recruiting is full of staffs that were fantastic in September. The graveyard is enormous. A charismatic young head coach who gets a family on the phone and makes them feel like the most interesting people in the sport is not a new invention, and half the men who have done it were fired inside four years.

That quote is the whole page. He is not skeptical of the staff. He is skeptical of his own ability to tell the difference, and so am I.

Sateki Vaeao named a top five and Michigan State is on top of itNo. 33 overall, four-star center, California

Michigan State, USC, Texas, Oregon and Illinois. Read that list, then read the part where Michigan State is understood by everybody I spoke with to be leading it.

Vaeao is a center, which is the least glamorous category of player in this industry and the position that most reliably decides what an offense is allowed to attempt. Power and movement in the same body, which is uncommon. His hands are inside on nearly every rep I have watched. The processing in pass protection is behind the physical tools, which is normal at his age and is the line between a good college starter and a first-round pick.

What Michigan State did was describe the job. Not the program, not the facility, not the league. The specific Tuesday-through-Friday content of being a center in this offense, including that the center makes the front identification and that the quarterback’s read is built off what the center declares. They walked the family through it with tape, at length, and then they did it again with the position coach and again with the coordinator, and the answers matched.

The answers matching is not a small thing. It is the most common failure in recruiting pitches and nobody talks about it.

Michigan State can also point at a live example, which is Rustin Young at center, a converted six-foot-seven tackle moved to a position he had never played because the staff decided the job could be built around what he does well. Whether that works out is a separate argument. That it happened, on the field, in September, in front of a recruit’s family, is the argument.

Vaeao still has no official visit scheduled to East Lansing. That is the caution flag and it is a real one. Leading in September without a date on the calendar has a way of stopping being true around Thanksgiving.

Devin Jennings named a top five and Michigan State is on top of that one tooNo. 56 overall, four-star CB, Ohio

Michigan State, Indiana, Illinois, Florida and Ohio State. The Spartans lead and the field behind them has no obvious second.

This is my favorite recruitment on the board and it has been since August. Jennings is excellent in press and in bail press, and his hips are loose enough to carry most route stems without grabbing. He is also skinny, and today he is a non-factor when the ball is run at him. That is a weight room problem and a two-year one, and it is the entire reason he is available at all.

An Ohio corner with Ohio State on his list who has a Big Ten program from another state in front is worth stopping on. Ohio State does not lose these often and does not usually have to.

The pitch here was a job description again, which is starting to look like a method rather than a coincidence. Michigan State told him what the nickel is in this defense, what Tre Bell has actually been asked to do this season, and what a defensive back who can do three things is worth in a structure built out of lighter personnel. Jennings, by every account, asked good questions and got answers he could check.

Whether a seventeen-year-old chooses a school because the coordinator explained a role well is a question I have never once been able to answer honestly.

Tyreke Carter, and the last nameNo. 266 overall, four-star DT, Ohio

Carter made Michigan State the leader of a top five. Georgia is on that list, and Georgia has a way of being on a list in September and signing the player in December.

He is the younger brother of Jalen Carter, the Philadelphia defensive tackle, and I am going to spend one sentence on that because the family has been clear it does not want the recruitment covered as a sequel. Tyreke is a different player. Thick lower half, wins early with quickness rather than with power, and everything after the first step is unfinished. There is real disagreement in this industry about whether he is a 266 or a 130, and I lean toward the second.

What Michigan State has going here is time. They were in early, before the ranking moved, and they have been consistent since. Georgia arrived recently and arrived big.

I would not bet on Michigan State holding this. I also would not have predicted Michigan State would be leading it in September, so my record on this one is already bad.

James Thomas picked three, and Michigan State is the leaderNo. 203 overall, four-star QB, Flushing, Mich.

Michigan State, Indiana and TCU. That is the list, and the Spartans are in front.

Thomas is forty minutes from campus. Michigan State has not signed an in-state quarterback the state was excited about in a long time, and there is a version of the last decade of this program’s recruiting that is mostly about kids from this state deciding early that Michigan State was not where the interesting thing was happening.

Indiana is the real competition and it is a live threat. Curt Cignetti’s program can offer a quarterback everything Michigan State is offering and can also offer him a recent national title, which is a rather large thing to have on the table.

The Michigan State argument to a quarterback right now is not complicated: a redshirt freshman is starting, he is playing well, and the head coach calls the plays himself and built the offense around narrowing what the quarterback has to look at. Whether that reads as opportunity or as a warning depends on the seventeen-year-old.

Peacock and Fajardo, two different betsMississippi and Georgia

Jalen Peacock, No. 206 overall, four-star DT, Mississippi. Michigan State has pulled dead even with Ole Miss, which is his hometown school and roughly twenty minutes from his high school. That is a hard thing to do and it is the single most surprising line on this board to me. He has heavy hands and gets skinny through a gap in a way that cannot be coached. Conditioning is the honest limiter and everybody recruiting him knows it. Michigan State being level here is either a real relationship or a family being polite to a staff that has been extremely present, and I do not have a way to tell those two apart from here.

Diego Fajardo, No. 513 overall, three-star FS, Georgia. Now leaning Michigan State over Virginia Tech. Fajardo is the thesis of this entire board in one player: undersized, instinctive, arrives angry, a full year of development from a projection anybody would put their name on, and liked by Michigan State before anybody else was calling. If this staff is what it says it is, Fajardo is the player who proves it, and nobody will be able to say so until 2029.

Three where they are closingSoutherland, Ingold, Edwards

Marquise Southerland is gaining and Ohio State still leads. The Tampa linebacker flies, and he is light and raw and either a three-year project or a sophomore starter with very little in between. The official is still on the calendar. Michigan State moving from fifth on that list to second is progress that does not convert into anything by itself.

Josh Ingold has reversed. Last week I wrote that Minnesota had come out of nowhere and that Michigan State was losing a recruitment it had been comfortable in, and that it worried me more than the five-star news pleased me. That has flipped inside seven days and there may be a visit coming. I do not have a clean explanation for the flip and I am wary of pretending I do.

Roosevelt Edwards is a straight fight with Michigan and nobody else is close enough to matter. The Walled Lake edge is heavy-handed and better against the run than most high school edge rushers, and the bend is the open question. This is the recruitment where the in-state argument gets tested with a real opponent instead of against inertia. Michigan is 1-1 and just lost at home by thirty-two, which is worth exactly nothing in a recruitment and will be brought up by everybody anyway.

Jake Landing is going the other way

Ole Miss, Indiana and LSU have all gained on Michigan State with the No. 3 player in the country, and the Spartans are now clearly behind.

This was always the likely outcome and I said so when he named them. Michigan State got on a list it had no business being on, and lists are where recruitments start rather than where they end. The official visit is still scheduled, which means there is one weekend left where this can change, and a first-year staff hosting its first five-star official is not the group I would bet on to win a weekend against LSU.

Landing is big, sticky in man, and reads route combinations in zone at a level almost nobody his age does. The open evaluation question is still whether he is a pure outside corner or something more useful than that.

Patrick Paul released a top 10 and Michigan State is not on it

Nine of the ten schools on Paul’s list have signed a top-ten class this decade. Michigan State has not signed a top-thirty class this decade.

This is not a wound and it should not be covered as one. The No. 14 player in the country trimmed his list and a program in year one of a rebuild did not survive the trim. That is the ordinary functioning of the sport.

What I will note, because it is the only useful thing in it, is that Michigan State got a clean answer in September instead of being kept warm until January. A staff this small cannot afford to be strung along, and the families who string people along are not doing it out of malice, they are doing it because nobody tells them to stop.

Michigan State dropped Marvin Officer IIINo. 53 overall, four-star SS, Texas · the most interesting item on this board

Officer is the No. 53 player in the country. Michigan State stopped recruiting him this week. There was no announcement, no graphic, nothing on his account, and the only reason I know is that I asked a direct question and got a direct answer.

The reasoning was resources. Michigan State had a top-100 safety fifteen hundred miles away who was going to take his time, who had a large group of schools involved, and who was going to require an enormous share of a small staff’s fall to stay merely even in. They decided that fall was worth more spent on a center in California and a corner in Ohio and a quarterback in Flushing. So they stopped spending it on him.

That is the second name this staff has taken off its own board in three weeks. I have covered programs that could not do it once in an entire cycle. Removing a name is an admission that you are not going to win, in writing, in front of people who will remember it, and there is a specific institutional cowardice in this industry where nobody is willing to be the person who makes that admission. So boards bloat with kids who stopped returning calls in July and everybody agrees to call it a pipeline.

Every other item on this page is a seventeen-year-old’s opinion. Seventeen-year-olds change their minds in October for reasons that never get written down, and none of the good news on this board survives contact with a bad November on its own. A program deciding not to spend is different. That is a decision made by adults who have to sit in a room and defend it to each other, and it is the only thing on this page that tells you anything about how this operation actually runs when nobody is watching.

I would trade all four of the named lists for one more of these.

Carson Coakley and George Dickinson: nothing happened, twice

The No. 1 player in the country did not say anything this week. The official visit is still on the calendar, Alabama and Indiana are still in it, and there is nothing else to report. That is fine and it is what should have happened. Coakley is moving faster than his class, and fast recruitments have a specific failure mode where a kid narrows to three, takes his visits, and the school with the best weekend wins.

George Dickinson also had nothing happen, and Michigan State is still leading, and the reason is the least sophisticated one in the industry: he likes the head coach. He has said so to people who have no reason to pass it along to me. Long, obviously unfinished frame, feet that are better than they look at first, and he plays through contact rather than absorbing it. Michigan State needs offensive tackles for reasons obvious to anyone who noticed they moved one of theirs inside.

I have seen recruitments turn on less than that, and I have seen a hundred of them survive on nothing else.

Everybody else: nothing happened

Larry Barnes Jr., no news. Darien Allgeier, no news. Lindsey Kane, Enrique Leon, Ethan Grubbs, Jamal Bowser. Nothing, none of them, not one line.

Six of eighteen active targets with absolutely nothing to report is a light week in that column, which by itself tells you how unusual the rest of this was. If you read a site with news on every name every Monday, you are reading a site that is making it up.

How excited to be

More than last week. Less than the number six suggests.

Everything on this board is reversible and most of it will reverse. Two of the named lists are lists Michigan State will lose, the staff would tell you that itself, and a program leading for six players in September has led for six players in September approximately eleven thousand times in the history of this sport without any of it meaning anything.

What is different, and what I cannot dismiss even when I try, is that the schools Michigan State is now measured against changed inside a month. USC and Texas and Oregon for a center. Ohio State and Florida for a corner. Georgia for a defensive tackle. That is a category of company this program has not kept in a very long time, and a category of company nobody in this industry expected it to keep before 2028 at the earliest.

The honest position, and the one I am going to hold until somebody gives me a reason not to, is that I cannot tell yet whether Michigan State has found a better way to recruit or has hired a man who is unusually good at the first phone call. Both explain everything on this page. Only one of them is still true in December.

They play at Notre Dame on Saturday afternoon, and several of these kids will be watching for the same reason everyone else is.