recruiting update

Back in action with a medium-big update to the recruiting board. For real, I tried to post on Friday, but that involved trying to bang one out at work, and that darn job kept me busy. Anyway, back to a daily schedule with a bonus one today. Here's what's changed on the board:

- Removed RB Silas Redd (Penn State) and OT Seth Betancourt (Boston College) who committed places. Redd is a Penn State guy through and through - I think, if that weren't the case, we might have had a real good shot at picking him up. No dice though.

- Also removed RB Donnell (Darnell?) Kirkwood. Christ, the recruiting sites don't even know or agree on what his name actually is, let alone who's offered him ($). Rivals had an offer listed for Kirkwood from us, but he very specifically shot that down, which is pretty rare. So, off the board.

- Added TE Josh Lovell and S Kyrrel Latimer. Lovell, in the interest of full disclosure, is actually a re-add, who came off the board earlier because I saw his name mentioned once, never again, and thought maybe the coaches had thrown that one back in the ocean. That'll teach me to overthink this stuff.

Also, quite a bit of shuffling between the various sections:

- DE Kareem Martin, LB Marcus Rush, LB Ty Linton, S Andre Simmons move up from yellow to blue. Rush has us in a dead heat ($) at the top right now, with Michigan. So I can't lose. I still think UNC will be tough to beat for Linton, but he keeps looking our direction.

- WR Adrian Flemming dropped from blue to yellow. No offer, and as time goes by he'll drop even further without one, since you can't accept a scholarship from a school that hasn't, you know, actually offered one.

- DE Henry Anderson moved up from red to yellow. He's at least mentioning us despite a pretty hefty offer list. This is still sort of a reddish-yellow though, at least if that weren't also called "orange" and used to delineate verbal commits.

- S Dontae Johnson dropped from yellow to red, coinciding with Simmons' move on up. Johnson has always talked a lot about Michigan State anyway.

You might also notice the presence of ratings and stuff. I figured having passed May 1 was as good a reason as any to start putting those in, now that the sites themselves are starting to add them. Blank spaces mean no rating yet. Rivals only has stars by their top 250 at the moment, Scout uses the one-star-of-no-rating pretty liberally even at the end of the recruiting season, and ESPN randomly puts 40 down when they don't know. The nice thing about ESPN is that the usage of said 40 rating has been going steadily downwards as they improve their recruiting coverage, which really only started in earnest in 2007.