Recruiting the defensive line

[Old Man Mike]

[Gentlemen: this is a first try at this so bear with me]. ESPN has a lengthy section up where it lists who it believes are the top prospects position-by-position for the 2012 class. Because I am always concerned about us having enough bigs, I waded through the TOP 100 defensive tackle prospects from their point-of-view. Notre Dame was listed as being an interested party in four of these prospects. Danny O'Brien [6'3", 278lbs, Michigan ]; Dante Phillips [ 6'6", 268lbs, Florida]; Tommy Schutt [ 6'3", 301lbs, Illinois]; and Mike Shoff [6'6", 290lbs, Nebraska]. The first three of these were among the first ten prospects on the list. Staff Kelly apparently believes [as I do for what that's worth] that we need to recruit at least one nose tackle to fill the pipeline behind Louis Nix. They seem to be shooting high. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This led to a more generic question as to how difficult it might be to recruit, region-by-region, in the country. Of these 100 prospects, 13 were from Texas. Florida AND MICHIGAN were next with 9 each. Georgia had 8, and New Jersey had 6. [ or thereabouts--my eyes were beginning to cross ]. Ohio and Illinois chipped in with another 10 or so combined. The point , I guess, is that I went into this expecting us to be at a severe regional disadvantage [even with our heralded "national" recruiting presence], and that Texas and the South would dominate this. Well, there's a little of that, but if we can "hold serve" in our backyard and New Jersey, we may not be in such "unfair competition" as we think. I note that Kelly is recruiting the "backyard" so far as NTs are concerned with one fling into Florida. It would be interesting to see what the other positions are like.

 

[IrishLax]

There's a big difference between top 100 and top 10. I care about how many top 10 guys are in Mcihigan/Indiana/Illinois and how many are in the south.

Do you have those stats?

 

[NDOM]

This is by far the best defensive recruiting I have seen since the Lou Hotz days. Its gonna be interesting to see if we are gonna get at least a DT. We need 2 good ones if you as me and I think that would be freeking sweet with what we have already. Either way its gonna be exciting to see what we end up with talent wise.

 

[IrishLax]

On the 150 watch list there are 3 in IL/MI/IN and 16 in the south/california out of 25. So 12% are in our geographic region and 64% are SEC country/Texas/Cali.... yeah, we're at a pretty freaking big geographic disadvantage.

 

[Old Man Mike]

To ILax: you've made a run at answering your question already. The reason that i didn't get too particular about that sort of breakdown yet was that this is the junior class and a lot has to happen yet to shake out who's really top 10 vs "only" top 100. I figured that doing the whole top 100 would say something statistically that doing only 10 wouldn't do. Still, I was happy to see that our region was producing a fair amount of Big Power talent.