IU 2023 Roster: Early Signing Period, Part 2

On the final day of the Early Signing Period, what happened and what is yet to come for Indiana?

Since I’m stuck indoors thanks to the -34-degree wind chill, I figured I’d offer an update to the latest edition of Bite-Sized Bison. 

Today is the final day of the Early Signing Period, which means high school prospects will need to wait until the Regular Signing Period to sign NLIs if they haven’t signed already. In the meantime, schools will be vying for their commitments and filling holes on the roster with transfers who remain in the portal. 

Here is the calendar I included in the last newsletter:

• Early Signing Period: 12/21-12/23

• Transfer portal closes: 1/19/23

• Regular Signing Period: 2/1/23-4/1/23

Updating IU’s position

I mentioned the separate needs Indiana had between high school signings and portal signings. The reason there are separate needs is because both pools of prospects offer different benefits.

In the portal, teams raise their ceilings. They can bring in starters or high-level depth that might be missing at certain positions. Yes, they can sign extremely young players with three years of eligibility left, but hitting on those signings can be difficult. The portal can also offer temporary production until younger, promising players develop. You might notice that this is not exactly how Indiana has been using the portal, and that is due to a lack of a functional recruiting strategy (and player development) dating back to the Class of 2019. 

High school prospects are as they always have been: adding potential talent that is scouted based on their ability to be coached and developed in the long-term. This is even more emphasized because of the portal. Teams typically won’t need freshmen to step in immediately. 

These lines can obviously be blurred based on teams’ needs, but ideally for teams at the level of Indiana, the strongest recruiting work would be done by building a foundation with high school signings and filling gaps with transfers.

With this in mind, I suggested the following courses of action for Indiana, based on immediate and long-term needs on the scholarship chart:

Indiana has successfully completed four of these moves (in addition to the commitments they had going into the Early Signing Period).

• Added an OT in the portal

  • Max Longman (UMass) brings two years of eligibility to the position. Regardless of whether he supplants Josh Sales as the second starting tackle next to Matt Bedford, he offers high-level depth that Parker Hanna simply doesn’t. 

• Added a CB in the portal

  • Jamier Johnson (Texas) was a pleasant surprise! A four-star, top-300 prospect in 2021, Johnson played 17 games at Texas; his best was against Alabama, when he played 50 snaps and earned an average PFF Defensive Grade for the game. That’s a win every time for Indiana. 

• Added a high school edge rusher at DE

  • Ta’Derius Collins’ addition to this class cannot go understated. Kasey Teegardin (arguably the best recruiter on staff) and Pat Randolph were in their bag landing the No. 44 edge rusher in the class. Indiana desperately needs an addition here from the portal too. 

• Added a high school CB

  • This was already in the works when I published the last newsletter, but adding Jordan Shaw helps at a position Indiana saw depleted with the transfers of Keys and Watley-Neeley. What’s unfortunate about those transfers is that Brandon Shelby and the staff had done a good job with their recruiting strategy in that room before this.

Holt-Bennett announced his commitment to UAB on Tuesday, so he is not coming back, but Indiana could still make some of the moves above because it has lots of room on its roster to do so. The scholarship chart stands at a max of 82 scholarships represented as of this morning. It will likely not stay at that number, as guys in the portal find their places elsewhere and players with COVID years decide what they will do with their futures.

On the morning of the final day of the Early Signing Period, Indiana has as few as 3 scholarships to work with and as many as 19. Below is an image of the scholarship chart. Access the live spreadsheet here.

To update some of the facts listed at the beginning of the last edition of BSB… 

• Indiana remains last in the Big Ten in recruiting class rankings but no longer in a tier of its own. Purdue has fallen behind Wisconsin in 247Sports’ point total to join IU at the bottom.

• The Hoosiers rank third-to-last among Power 5 teams, 71st nationally.

• After adding a few new commitments, Indiana’s total is now at 13, tying Purdue and pulling ahead of Cal (10), Kansas (12), and Ole Miss (12). Of the five schools mentioned here, two have lost their head coaches this offseason, and Lance Leipold could move on from Kansas. This would explain their small classes. As you can see from the table below, there is a difference between a small recruiting class because of small graduating classes and a small recruiting class because of other reasons. It’s certainly not the former for Indiana.

Source: 247Sports