Maurice Harkless Changes Maryland Visit Date, Makes it an Unofficial

Remember when Maurice Harkless set his an official visit to Maryland for September 17th? Yeah, that's changing up a tad: it's now an unofficial visit, for one, and it's on Sept. 5, a day after another unofficial visit to Rutgers and three days after an unofficial to St. John's. Oh, and the day he was going to visit Maryland? That's now an official visit to Oregon.

On the surface, this isn't necessarily a bad thing and may not indicate anything at all. After all, the only tangible difference between an official visit and an unofficial one is that on an unofficial, the prospect has to pay the costs. That's not the case for an official visit, which is comp'd by the team and is usually reserved for longer visits, like, say to Oregon. NYC to College Park is a drive and pushing what most would do for an unofficial, but it's not a huge deal.

It does seem to indicate, though, that he intends to take a few more official visits, possibly stretching to the limit of five. If he does, they'll be to two different schools: Memphis and N.C. State are out, while Florida State and Oregon are in.

Oregon scares me a tad due to the Nike connections, but Maryland should still have the upper hand on both of those schools. We'll see in the long run, but based on a lot of factors, Maryland and St. John's appear to be - again, appear, not necessarily are - the teams to beat here.

As @billthay, Twitterer extraordinaire, pointed out, this does leave open an official visit to Maryland later in the season, if he chooses to take in a Comcast atmosphere, perhaps even with Sterling Gibbs. I have my own personal doubts - why would he take a bunch of visits before the season and then wait so long? plus, he said he wanted to commit before the season started if my memory serves - but it's definitely a possibility.

In fact, the only thing I might draw from this is that with Nate Blue out of the picture, relatively speaking, Harkless is tailoring the recruitment a bit more toward himself. I don't really know whether that's good or bad, but we'll find out soon. It also seems to indicate, at least to me, that he's trying to speed his recruitment up: it used to be that he would've taken two visits by the 17th, whereas now it's four. That's an upgrade.

The biggest impact: if anyone wants to do a big, Harkless-oriented project (an "H" next to the flower "M", photoshopped posters, whatever), you have twelve fewer days to get your plan together.