Last month I posted about which states Michigan recruited in the class of 2016 (LINK). This month it’s time to take a look at which confereces are stealing the most Michigan targets.
By percentage:
By raw number:
CONCLUSIONS
As you can see, Michigan lost more recruits to the SEC than to any other conference. As a top-level program, Michigan offers some of the best recruits across the country, and a lot of the top recruits end up playing in the SEC. Additionally, Michigan jumped headfirst into recruiting the Southeast, bolstered by the fact that former defensive coordinator D.J. Durkin had just spent a couple years building connections in Florida. The conference that surprised me the most was the Pac-12. Michigan has made sporadic attempts to recruit the Pac-12 imprint over the years, usually just going for players they deem to be very high-level players or an occasional, random 3-star they think they can pull because they only have low-level offers from their geographical area. It was pretty natural to assume Jim Harbaugh and his long-time staffers would play off his Stanford and 49ers fame to make inroads on the West Coast, but the Pac-12 landed as many Michigan targets (38) as the 13 non-Michigan schools in the Big Ten.
Conference USA, the Mountain West, and the MAC generally just pose threats for players who might be struggling academically or have some other kind of issue. For example, the one recruit Michigan lost to the MAC was former Michigan commit Matt Falcon (Western Michigan), whose injury problems plagued him throughout high school.
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