If you follow this sort of thing, you're probably aware Houston Nutt's mission to help stock the abundant junior colleges of Mississippi with Division I talent led Ole Miss to sign 37 players last week, prompting a round of sarcastic choruses, tut-tutting, minor hand-wringing and, mainly, shrugs. This number is every bit as high as it looks: Teams regularly go over the 25-scholarship limit for a single class, but prior to the Rebels' latest frenzy, the largest one-year haul in Rivals' database, dating back to 2002, was Oregon State's 35-man parade in 2007; only one other team in that span, Texas Tech in 2006, inked as many as 34 in one class. So Houston Nutt's efforts this Signing Day weren't just exhaustive -- they were historic. The junior colleges will be very grateful their coming bounty of non-qualifiers and other castoffs.

But even Ole Miss' record-smashing haul, while garnering most of the attention, wasn't this year's most outrageous. That distinction belongs to the Troy Trojans, which became the first team in modern memory to somehow cram 40 guys into a single class. Nine are from junior colleges and one of the jewels of the lot, four-star linebacker and former Miami signee Antonio Harper, comes from a year in academic purgatory at Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia. Troy spokesman Ricky Hazel explained in an e-mail how the Trojans plan to accommodate such a demographic bulge:

Some of the players signed last week will "greyshirt" or not enroll until next January. .... The others who are over are players who will not qualify academically, and will be placed in junior colleges. Eugene Kinlaw, who signed from Hutchinson CC, is such a player, He signed with Troy three years ago, knowing he was not going to qualify academically. He was placed at Hutch where he blossomed into the national junior college defensive player of the year. He attracted a lot of attention from other schools but, because he signed at Troy out of high school and felt a closeness to the coaches here, he never waivered on his commitment to Troy and signed back. If he had not signed with Troy originally, the chances of him signing here now would have been very slim.

Clearly, that kind of loyalty is what Nutt is going for with the guys who eventually make it out of the two-year route, when he can call them up from the minors. Such coming and going frustrated Ole Miss under Ed Orgeron, who couldn't get or keep many of his best recruits in school, and is par for the course at Troy, which has had a truly incredible rate of turnover the last few years. Prior to gorging on 40 signatures this time around, the Trojans inked 33 players in 2008, 32 players in 2007 and 32 in 2005. Lose a few of those "extra" guys every year, and it seems like small potatoes. But collectively, if you compare the recruiting roster actual roster over time, it's like a black hole:

Compare that to some of the attrition numbers from bigger schools I posted on Friday: Troy's are three or four times as high. 2005 can be explained by natural attrition and graduation in four years; 2006 and 2007 (to some extent, although certainly not 60-plus percent) by a high number of junior college players who served their two years. But more than a third of last year's class is already gone, and more than a third of this year's class will have to go, one way or another.

I don't mean to pick on Troy, specifically, because it is at least hitting another number that a few schools are going to struggle with again this year: When the latest class is whittled down to the requisite 25 (or fewer), the Trojans should be well under the 85-scholarship limit for the entire roster with room to spare. Ole Miss, once it clears the bottleneck of its latest class, is going to be well under the mark, too. I looked at the old classes and most recent rosters of about a dozen other teams that "oversigned" by some degree last week, and not all of them can say that -- yet:

(UCLA, I should note, is the national champion of player retention: Every single member of the Bruins' 2007 and 2008 recruiting classes remains listed on the 2009 roster, which still includes all but two members of the 2006 class. No academic casualties; no transfers. You can't keep 54 out of 56 signees over three years in an EA Sports "dynasty," much less in the midst of a coaching change. But that means Rick Neuheisel's going to have to find a way to lose a few guys this time around.)

These numbers are always murky enough that they fall into the category of "best guess," but Alabama, North Carolina, Auburn and UCLA -- and probably some other schools that weren't part of the very small group I delved into -- are all far enough over the line here that, if the season started today, I'm confident they'd have to straight up cut some kids with whom they had a mutual commitment.

But the season doesn't start today, of course, and as Butch Davis knows from experience, natural attrition over the next six months will render the "oversigning" debate absolutely uncontroversial. I'm trying very hard not to call anyone a snake-oil salesman -- as Hazel writes to me: "None of the players signed will ever be told that they don’t fit. Everything is carefully organized to make sure we remain within NCAA rules." I think that's true. Rebel fans I know have a detailed, player-by-player account of how Ole Miss' latest class is going to work itself out, which will probably turn out to be pretty close to reality.

So, yes, a handful of schools find themselves hoping that a few players don't make the grade, decide their true calling is baseball or water colors or something or otherwise can't cut it. In the end, one way or another, they know they're going to be right. The odd men out will adjust their timelines or move on with their lives with a handshake and no fanfare, all the programs in question will quietly hit their marks and we won't hear heads or tails of the castoffs again until the unwieldy numbers start piling up again next year.