Michigan State secondary coach Blue Adams said he’d take all the defensive backs he could get. The Spartans’ most recent portal adds grant his wish.
Two defensive backs pledged to Michigan State in the portal this weekend. Anthony Pinnace III, a junior college transfer cornerback from Ypsilanti, committed to Michigan State out of the transfer portal late Saturday night. Tracy Revels, a safety out of Bowling Green, announced his commitment Sunday morning.
After appearing in no games in 2023, Revels broke out as an impact player at safety for Bowling Green. He finished his redshirt freshman season with 40 total tackles and one pass breakup across 12 games and 451 snaps. Pro Football Focus graded Revels the Falcons’ highest-rated safety at 70.3, ranking him 354th in his position across college football. His best work came in pass coverage.
Revels was a three-sport athlete who ran track and played basketball at Liberty-Eylau in Texarkana, Texas. He arrived at Bowling Green a three-star prospect with 11 Division I offers, including UTSA where he originally committed before a late push from Bowling Green before signing day brought him to Ohio. Revels has three more years of eligibility.
Pinnace played high school football at Ann Arbor Huron, where he primarily played quarterback and threw for more than 1,600 yards with 16 touchdowns with six more scores on the ground as an all-state honorable mention in 2021. He began his college career at the JUCO level at Independence Community College in Kansas, where he played cornerback.
JUCO ball was just a start for Pinnace’s football journey, one that has taken several winding turns up to this point. After two seasons at Independence, one of them a redshirt, an impressive reel of tape — including 10 pass breakups and three interceptions — earned Pinnace 10 Division I offers, mostly at the Group of Five level. He committed to Washington State in 2023, but wound up playing the 2024 season at Iowa Western, another junior college. He received 14 more Division I offers after that season, including one from Michigan State, before settling on UTSA back on Feb. 5. He hit the portal after spring camp on the last day of the transfer window and decided on the Spartans a day later.
All that traveling may come with a cost in terms of Pinnace’s eligibility. In December 2024, the NCAA granted a blanket waiver to JUCO athletes who had completed their final year of eligibility that season to play one more season. The waiver came after a Tennessee judge granted an injunction to allow Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia to play another year in 2025. However, Pinnace is a redshirt junior and will have two years of eligibility barring another ruling on JUCO eligibility in the future.
Michigan State brought in three more transfer cornerbacks in the winter portal window: Joshua Eaton (Oklahoma, Texas State), Malcolm Bell (Connecticut) and NiJhay Burt (Eastern Illinois). It lost defensive back Dillon Tatum, who played all over the secondary, to the spring portal window last week. Bringing in Pinnace and Revels stabilizes the room’s numbers to maintain depth, a need shown last season when as many as seven defensive backs were out injured for one game.
cearegood@detroitnews.com
@ConnorEaregood
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