WTKA Roundtable 7/11/2024: That's What Stanford Does to You

Things Discussed:

• Sam's squirrel problem. He wants a cat. Craig wants him to import mongooses. Seth suggests he put up a Michigan State flag and offer them all scholarships.
• Recruiting: back on track! Lost 2 guys they wanted, got 2 guys they really wanted, actually doing a little better than Harbaugh usual because they used to lose the Isaac Nautas and top-50 safeties to Notre Dame.
• Got themselves a Rod Moore comp in Ike Taylor. Seth: Michigan's free safety is a nickel—they want the SS to be a Paige so he can defend tight ends and when they motion a slot across the FS and Nickel swap jobs so FS needs to cover slots in space.
• Holly: See him as a Jaylen Harrell who's responsible and athletic. Craig thinks he'll be Brandon Graham and we call him insane.
• Babalola: Would be the #1 OT recruit in recorded M history.
• Recruiting strategy: stagger guys? Right now it's free transfers so you want guys who aren't going to leave. In the future when you can sign them to contracts Ohio State's going to be in great shape. You always take best available, but your board isn't the national board, and shouldn't be. Example: I wasn't too high on the Smith twins and they might have missed out on Edokpayi and Devon Baxter whom I like a lot.
• FSU and Clemson not talking to SEC/B10 anymore? Best guess if that's true it's because SEC/B10 don't want to be involved in the lawsuit.
• What's the future of this? There's no rationality to it so there's no stability to it, so I can't care about it. Right now it's just grabbing schools. Eventually there has to be some reckoning, a separation of divisions, dropping some schools. The things USF cares about are not the things that Michigan cares about, and having them competing for the same national championship isn't good for either of them.
• Brian: "Wait I would like to disparage, denigrate, and downgrade certain Big Ten members."
• Seth: You can dream about dropping schools all you want but you'd have to basically dissolve the Big Ten to get rid of Rutgers. The Pacific Conference did this once and reformed as the Pac-8 without Idaho.