Don't really know my grasshoppers and wasn't sure where to start.

not many books give any information about telling the nymphs apart - usually only the adults. The few publications mostly only deal with a few economically important species. So, it is hard to find a place to start. BugGuide is a good place, but even here a lot of the Melanoplus nymphs posted are still unidentified and sitting in limbo (for the same reason - nobody here knows how to identify them all). Yours was easy, because it is a common, well documented (sometimes economically important) species from an area where there aren't too many look-alikes; it is a nearly mature male, which means I could see the end of the abdomen and identify it not only by pattern, but also by the shape of the parts there.

I had initially tried to search images here on the guide, but I used "grasshopper" as the search term and it generated so many hits that it bogged down my computer. I found the differential using a Google image search, and it looked similar; and since the name was "differential", I thought it might be a fit. And even though they're common, they are still pretty little guys. When I was in Florida a few years back I loved the colors of the lubber nympths I saw there.