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https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/university-michigan/wolverines/2019/02/04/michigan-football-amauri-pesek-hickson/2767007002/

Some more scholarship shenanigans at Michigan.  Not cool, Harbaugh, not cool.

real dick move. Jim should know better, but honestly this is just par for the course for him. He's operated like this since his days at Stanford.

real dick move. Jim should know better, but honestly this is just par for the course for him. He's operated like this since his days at Stanford.

It's definitely a tough business, not all butterflies and flower petals. And "bad optics" fits this story. But he suspected this when the coaches refused his signature in December, and it's clear that none of these scholarship offers mean when they did in the 1970s. Now, Michigan's "scholarship offers" are conditional on continuing to meet certain standards (academics, citizenship, and - admittedly cutthroat but also making good sense - by staying above certain football cutoffs). And no one who's hit all those conditions has ever been cut. It also has to be that way if you're offering 250+ of them for 25 spots. And offering that many is increasingly common in a post-smart phone/-social media era.

Shocking. Outrageous.

I'm just not a fan of line in the sand thinking. And no one has ever restricted their recruiting to 25 circulating offers for a 25-man class, waiting to offer new guys only after one of the circulating offers is turned down. And everything past that is a continuum (whether 100 offers or 1,000). When it comes to continuums, lines in the sand are only drawn arbitrarily and out of convenience.

And this one can be communicated dispassionately and without drawing a line: "Michigan is probably a standard deviation from the national average."

They can put out ten million offers if they want.  Just don't lie to recruits and put them in bad positions.

Has anyone ever seen the actual wording of a written offer?  I imagine it is contingent, no?

Vague contingencies make offers almost irrelevant, almost as irrelevant as the verbal commitment by some 16 year old player.

I'm sure it's a thrill for a junior (or younger) to get an offer letter, but the "fine print" obviously makes it more of an expression of possible potential could be interest, perhaps.