Purdue Football Recruiting: Where We Stand

With the news coming this week of Markus Bailey committing, the excitement and momentum behind the 2015 class continues to build.  We have roughly 8 or 9 scholarships remaining to hand out.  I'd really like to see the coaching staff use those remaining spots to address some needs on the defensive line first and foremost, followed by some help at wide receiver and tight end, as well as another offensive lineman or two.

All that aside, we have twice the amount of commits this year that we did at the same time last year.  That's something to be optimistic about.  The coaching staff made a commitment this year to fill their needs before the fall semester, and so far they've done a pretty admirable job at doing just that.  Bottom line, we are at a much better position at this point than we were last year.  The coaching staff is using "#GoldRush15" as their bat-signal on twitter to indicate that a recruit has committed, which is pretty awesome.  We've also gone up 11 spots in the rankings on 247sports.com, all the way up to 51st nationally.  It's not exactly where we want to be, but it's a huge step in the right direction.

Here's a look at the updated scholarship grid:

The grid above is still not concrete, but Purdue did finally release their 2014 official fall roster on the website, which helps considerably.  If you see an error or you think I left someone out, let me know and I'll look in to it.

Where do we stand in the B1G?

Our two July commits vaulted us out of last place (on 247sports.com) and into 13^th, ahead of Minnesota and right on the heels of the powerhouse down in Bloomington.  I think we can pass IU (and hopefully Rutgers) before all is said and done.  Only five Big Ten teams remain without a 4-star recruit, and we are one of them.  I would not expect that to change.  For all of you that have been complaining about being left in the dust in terms of sheer numbers, the average number of commits for B1G teams for 2015 is about 12, and we now have 11.  It's pretty sobering to see that we are still ranked so low with all the recent excitement and action we've seen.  The coaching staff will still probably pick up another 2 or possibly 3 commits over the next two weeks.  After that, we will most likely not hear anything until November and December.