Sunday morning, this morning even, the Kansas Jayhawk football program received two of their final commitments of the class. Because of NCAA violations and such, we are only allowed 21 scholarships this season as opposed to the 25 usually allowed. The two signings this morning bring us to 20 overall, with two 4-stars (also two of the three JUCOs coming in) and 18 3-stars, which are all HS players except for the one, Rod Harris.
Today, we received a commitment from Jocques Crawford, a huge get as a 4-star JUCO. After missing out on Cyrus Gray, who chose the closer-to-home Texas A&M over 5 other schools including Kansas, Crawford was next up on Mangino's wish list, and might have even been ahead of Cyrus Gray. Crawford figures to be immediately inserted into the runningback mix, along with three returning Jayhawks in Jake Sharp, Angus Quigley and Carmon Boyd-Anderson. We will get a lot more in-depth about this once we start previewing the football season, and the runningbacks in particular, but this commitment is awesome news. More than awesome, even.
The other commit of the day was much less anticipated, as the commit wasn't even on the radar of most Jayhawk fans. Josh Richardson is a LBer, though, and we did need to add another one in this class. With all three of our current starters slated to be seniors next season, we need to start filling our rosters with their future replacements. We already have two on our roster, Drew Dudley and Justin Springer, but the other outside slot has been open to just about anyone for the 2009 season and beyond. Maybe Richardson is that guy, maybe not, but at the very least he is another really good body to throw in there. His other offers were from Bowling Green and Central Michigan, so he wasn't necessarily a highly-sought-after commodity. He is much more representative of the Mangino classes of old, where he would be one of the better incoming recruits, whereas he now represents a bottom-tier prospect in this class.
More on these guys once we turn our attention back to football, but it is full on basketball right now.
ROCK CHALK!