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Michigan director of recruiting Matt Dudek is the first person who will tell you that staff evaluations matter — not recruiting rankings.
Yes, the two go hand-in-hand in some fashion, given that the recruiting services — 247Sports, Rivals and ESPN — all do their own national evaluations, doing their best to create a hierarchy of the best football players at the high school level across the country. But, they don’t see everyone, and it’s not an exact science.
There are certainly times where the services differ from what a football staff sees. There are times when a recruiting site does a quick evaluation and puts a player in their system as a three-star. But the football staff might see a guy personally at a camp, work him out, and feel like said player has a much higher upside than what the sites say.
For Michigan, such is the case of signee Jeffrey Persi.
The San Juan Capistrano (CA) J Serra Catholic offensive tackle is rated now as a four-star by all of the recruiting services, but he was widely seen as a three-star at the time of his commitment. So, when breaking down the offensive line haul for the 2020 class to Jon Jansen on the In the Trenches podcast, Dudek singled out Persi as being a player who, despite the ratings jump, could vastly outperform his ranking.
“What I can tell you in watching them is that they’re big-body types,” Dudek said. “They fit in with the six guys we brought in last year. They’re gonna look the same way. Persi’s probably the tallest of all nine of those guys over two classes. He’s a big, big guy. But what you’ll see is they’re road graders, but they have athleticism to them. They’ve very strong.
“Jeff Persi – there’s a lot of guys I’m excited about. Let’s talk about all these guys. But Jeff Persi, when he committed to us in the summer, I’m like, ‘Okay. This is the guy! He’s all the way in California. We’ve gotta hold onto this guy for dear life, make sure we’re communicating with him. Gotta make sure we’re doing everything right. We don’t want to lose him to the West Coast.’ Because you get away from Michigan, you kind of forget a little bit. And nobody more solid than him and his family. His dad is an awesome dude. Love talking to him. No bigger guy to mess around with. I call them ‘old Jeff’ and ‘young Jeff.’ But just really good people.
“The fact that he got bumped to a four-star later in the season, the fact that he’s – he’s a top 5 offensive tackle in the country. I’ll say it right now. Everybody: four years from now, feel free to blow me up on Twitter. You can do so anyway, I don’t care. I’m telling you right now: Jeff Persi is a top 5 offensive tackle in the country. And when he gets here and develops under Ed Warinner and under Ben Herbert, I cannot wait to see that guy play.”
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Persi is listed as 6-foot-7, 265-pounds. He has the frame to be a prototypical offensive tackle, but as Dudek noted, he’ll thrive once he adds more weight to his frame as well as technique.