It can't hurt. My best guess is that the lower numbers, but higher quality, is one of two things. One possibility is that there was a negative effect from Coach George leaving just at the peak June recruiting period. The other possibility is that it reflects a deliberate strategy, to be more selective.

Virtually everyone who has verballed so far is a 3-star, rather than the 2-star recruits of prior years, so is that a coincidence, or a strategy? I don't have the time to follow recruiting that closely, so I can't answer that. I don't know if they have issued less offers this year than they did in years past. It's certainly possible that they felt that the classes were filling too fast, and they were missing out on better quality athletes late, so they were more selective early. Perhaps Ted can comment on whether the number of early offers out this year is as high as prior years.

ExCat 21, what about the National TV, exposure. The commentators talked about the NFL ability of Basham, Brown and Smith. If you as a recruit saw that, would that impress you?

It helps in that it ensures continuity in tradition. A MAC East title would be more important for recruits than a Toledo win even with a lopsided result in the championship game. Solich already has 3 MAC East titles but its been a while. He's proved to recruits he can contend for a MAC Championship. Winning the MACC this year says the program is ready to contend for a NYD game.

How many open scholarships will/do we have? Is it few such that this class will naturally be small?

Or does the staff feel depth is good, just needs a bit of in-fill and wants to hold for greater need in years further out?

Or maybe we don't see many recruit-worthy guys available this coming spring but see rich target classes after this coming spring??

Ellison states in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t77_FTuacI4 that his only offer is Toledo this summer. So he eventually gets one from us as well. Then we play at Toledo and win, but only that he sees that our RB ran for over 200 yards and 2 TD's. Days later, he commits. So instead of saying no....I'll say depends. But he obviously was teetering between 2 schools who wanted him. We won the recruiting battle. I remember posts from the past were some BAers thought we always lost big recruiting battles for OHIO athletes to other top MAC schools. Here is a prime example of the tide changing....