recruiting board update

It's about that season where this thing requires weekly housecleaning. Let's get to it.

- Moved Brandon Phelps to orange and changed his position to CB. More in a bit.

- Added DE Thompson Brown to orange.

- Removed QB Kevin Hogan (Stanford), DE Corey Marshall (VT), and LB Nick Menocal (Miami.)

- Removed OT Landon Turner. Will this cause him to declare a top three like the below-mentioned Thourogood? Probably, just to spite me, but even more probably he's not coming to UVA.

- Re-added QB Lafonte Thourogood, to yellow this time. Convenient he would name a top three, like, the day I decide to drop him from the board. Fine, but I'm still awfully pessimistic about our chances to be honest.

- Re-added CB Jeremiah Hendy, currently "committed" to Maryland, to yellow as well. Here, this is the kind of thing that always makes me laugh a bit. Rivals and Scout are super-duper secretive about the recruiting information they put out, but as always they have to walk a fine line between protecting their info (making a subscription worth something) and letting you know they have it. So when a question is asked in the free portion of a subscription article such as "CB Hendy plans return visit to Virginia?" the answer is generally yes. Otherwise, why write the article? When it's a headline, you might as well mentally erase the question mark.

- Added CB Tim Scott to yellow. Lot of DB's, yeah? Doesn't bother me one bit, except that it'll be a hell of a time actually figuring out where they'll go. Very versatile bunch, really. I already mentioned Matt Bailey as a candidate for linebacker, for example.

Let me just add a quick word about Brandon Phelps committing. That word is (ahem): WOOFUCKYEAH!! It's not possible to overstate how big a deal this is. Phelps had offers from some of the biggest of the big boys: Alabama**, LSU, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State. It sure didn't hurt that he's a legacy, but hot damn any time you beat out 20 other schools with that kind of name, you have a winner. As big an Al Groh apologist as I have been, Al Groh probably would not have reeled in Phelps.

**Alabama has a way of sending out offers that aren't exactly "committable." It's in the same vein as the way a prospect will call himself committed somewhere so they hold the place for him while he looks around. It's a placeholder, in a way. LSU probably does this. Michigan does this, though neither as much as "hey-let's-sign-37-prospects-this-year" Alabama. It's why Michael Strauss has an an Alabama "offer" that looks weird next to the ones from UAB, FIU, and WMU. In Phelps's case, these are very definitely Big, Serious, committable offers.