Recruiting is on everybody's mind, including the major publications so have a ton of good recruiting nuggets today. Of course, nothing ground breaking as everyone is playing in tight until tomorrow but you can sense the anticipation. It is going to be a wild ride tomorrow.
The North County Times in the Southern California area gave a nice mention to the Buffs today and how CU (along with Utah) is one of the prominent schools to come to the area and take recruits away from schools like SDSU. Special Teams and Tight End coach Kent Riddle is featured in the article. Edward Nuckols is the Buffs lone San Diego area recruit this year according to the article.
Mission Hills' Edward Nuckols, the best defensive lineman in the area, will sign with the Buffaloes ---- he'll be the eighth North County player to go to Colorado in the last six classes.
"San Diego has been pretty good to us," said Riddle, who's in his fourth year as the Buffaloes' tight ends and receivers coach. "I really think I have as good a recruiting territory as anyone could hope for ---- great weather, great people and great football players."
The Rocky Mountain News has a good feature on Colorado Prep, Parker Orms, who will sign his letter of intent with the Buffs tomorrow at his high school. It will be very interesting to see what Parker does at the next level. He has the ability to play a ton of positions but finding his niche on the field will be the main focus the next four years.
According to the AZCentral.com, Arizona State is still in the running for Diante Jackson. When we interviewed Diante, he mentioned Arizona State but he never really sounded that interested in them. I would be shocked if he ended up going there. I think his mention of ASU is purely a courtesy call out to people recruiting him. I believe it is still Oregon and Colorado duking it out. I still have a good feeling that Jackson will be a Buff. He will announce mid-day tomorrow.
Buff recruit, DT Justin Brown, committed to Oregon yesterday according to ESPN.com. The Buffs really cooled on defensive linemen after they got Nuckols and Kasa. I don't believe Colorado wanted Brown's signature due to grades, full at the position, etc. Good luck to Brown at Oregon. He would have been a good prospect for the Buffs to have.
ESPN.com also has a report from 4* S Byron Moore on his visit to Boulder last weekend. Moore will be one of the first players to announce on ESPNU (8:00 am MT) tomorrow. Here are some quotes from Moore:
"It was a great trip," Moore said. "The campus was beautiful, the players and coaches were all fun to be around and I can definitely picture myself playing at Colorado for the next four years of my life.
"The coaches are all about the players there and I have a good relationship with Coach Hagan who has been recruiting me for a while now. I loved my visit to Notre Dame too and now that I've taken this last visit, I can compare evenly all three of my final schools and lay out all the positives and negatives."
The third school in the mix Moore was referring to is USC. After de-committing, most assumed the Trojans were out of the running but Moore said that wasn't the case.
"USC is still in it for sure," Moore said. "I'm still in contact with them but I wanted to look at some other options too. I wanted to be respectful and I felt that if I'm going to look around, I should de-commit to be fair to the other schools and let them know I was serious about them.
"Coach Carroll told me he understood but also said he was going to keep fighting for me and I told him that was fine. Now I have a few days to look over everything and then I'll be ready to decide early Wednesday morning."
Well, I liked the Buffs chances a lot better if USC didn't magically get back in the picture. I thought they were out but I guess not. USC is Moore's dream school so we usually know how that goes, even if he just did decommit last week. We will know quickly on Moore which will be good. Him and teammate, Josh Moten, will be announcing together.
Neil Woelk said it best in his article today. Many CU fans are complaining about the uptick in season ticket prices, the late basketball games, etc. All of these decisions are obviously financially driven but Woelk says all the woes can be cured by one thing: winning.
But if Colorado can be a middle-of-the-road department in terms of budget, facilities, etc., the Buffs can be competitive in the Big 12. They’ve done it before, and the solution is simple.
Win. Nothing cures a program’s budgetary ills like a winning season — and it’s why next year will be one of the most important in recent CU history.
Here is AD Mike Bohn's town hall meeting schedule for this year. Woodrow and I will attempt to get to a few of these and hopefully have some audio from them.