BEILEIN CRAPS OUT ON RECRUITING TRAIL

(originally published on 11-14-14)

"National Signing Day" for college basketball was on Wednesday, November 12, as a thousand or more players across the country signed their binding letters-of-intent at hundreds of different schools. But the University of Michigan did not sign a single player for their 2015 recruiting class.

I was surprised to find out that John Beilein has an empty recruiting class. We have quite honestly been more focused recently on football recruiting. Beilein still has the rest of this week to find some warm bodies, plus the late-signing period comes up next April. But the vast majority of players who will play basketball at the vast number of schools who offer it sent in their LOI's on Wednesday.

UM has not registered a zero on the recruiting trail for as long as rankings are listed on the Rivals web sites. Those rankings go back to 2002, and the Wolverines have never had a blank list during that time. They signed only one player in only one year (2004 - Ron Coleman).

Michigan State during that same time period also never had a zero-sum recruiting class. The Spartans had three years in which they had only two players since 2002, but never only one or none.

That John Beilein is crazy like a fox. He must know what he's doing, right? After all, this is Michigan for gosh sakes. He must figure that taking six players last year, then red-shirting none of them, then letting one recruiting class go by the wayside, is the way to go.

Where did you first hear this story?

Probably right here, as we haven't seen

any coverage of this in any sports media

during the past few days.

This is an actual STORY, it's "news".

It's something that has never happened before. Why doesn't the Michigan

Mainstream Media Machine report on it?

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