Dakota Guerrant spurns Michigan Football for elite Big Ten school

It was announced on Tuesday afternoon that 2027 four-star wide receiver Dakota Guerrant was committing to the Oregon Ducks over the Michigan Wolverines.

The 6-foot-1.5, 200-pounder from Harper Woods is a borderline five-star talent, coming in at No. 1 in the state of Michigan, No. 7 at the wide receiver position and No. 38 overall in the 2027 class on the Rivals Industry Ranking. He has been a longtime target of Michigan’s dating back to when Ron Bellamy was the position coach in Ann Arbor. New wide receivers coach Micah Simon picked up where Bellamy left off and made Guerrant and his family an immediate priority.

Today’s news, of course, is no surprise if you pay close attention to Michigan football recruiting. Guerrant has been trending to Oregon for months now, and while it sucks that he committed somewhere else other than Michigan, that doesn’t necessarily mean the recruitment is completely over.

In fact, what just happened was always a very legitimate possibility. Guerrant has been talking about wanting to see more out of Michigan’s passing offense since last year. Now he is wanting to see what things look like under head coach Kyle Whittingham and the rest of the new coaching staff. Of course, none of us will be able to see that until Sept. 5 when the season officially kicks off against Western Michigan. He has wanted to commit before his senior year, so again, this development is not a shock by any means.

“I feel like Michigan has always been good to me, the connections they have there, it’s a great football team always and they’ll probably throw it a little more this year,” Guerrant recently told Rivals.

That concern about the passing game is precisely why Oregon makes so much sense as a landing spot right now. The Ducks have been a premier destination for quarterbacks and wide receivers over the last few years under head coach Dan Lanning. Two skill players — tight end Kenyon Sadiq and wide receiver Malik Benson — were just drafted into the NFL back in April. Furthermore, Troy Franklin and Tez Johnson are two other wideouts that have been drafted since Lanning arrived at Oregon in 2022.

So what will Michigan need to show him specifically? My two cents — volume and explosiveness in the passing game. Guerrant likely wants to see more targets, yards after the catch, and big plays for the wideouts; the kind of stat line that tells a pass-catcher that this is a program that will get him on an NFL radar. The Wolverines have only produced five NFL draft picks at the position this decade — and none the past two years — so they clearly need to bump up their numbers to be legitimate contenders for recruits like Guerrant.

All this to say — if Underwood and company take a step forward with the passing game this season, the door will swing open for Michigan to potentially flip Guerrant prior to the December signing window. But for now, we’ll just have to wait and see if the pass game reaches its full potential so the Wolverines can even have a shot at flipping him.