Bumped. Yes, recruiting is not exact, but you can't argue that our incoming talent isn't competitive. - BN eds.

This is the first time I've followed an off-season of UCLA football, so I am new to the whole recruiting thing. In fact, I never paid any attention to it before. But, after reading BN for about a year now and reading all the interesting comments and posts people make, I thought I would post the following data--just for fun. I got the idea after making a comment about our talent versus Nebraska. Hopefully, this gets you out of the summer doldrums for a little while!

I wanted to compare our recruiting ranking (using Scout.com) with all of our opponents for the upcoming season and see how we stack up. I had the vague idea that we would be pretty good and our opponents pretty bad, but I wanted to see the numbers. So, I compiled the recruiting rankings for the last 6 classes (to account for 5th year seniors, redshirts, etc). Also, I was curious to see how far off from our hated rivals u$c we were (and Stanford too--since they have been very good recently).

This is a very crude analysis, and not something you put too much stock into. But, it does show how we should not fear anyone on our schedule (including $c) since we have the talent to play with anybody (proof: see games against Texas). I'll leave it to the dear readers to provide the analysis and insightful comments.

See some charts with fancy colors after the jump! (I've always wanted to say that!)

I made horizontal lines emanating from UCLA's ranking for each year, so you can visually compare it year by year to the other schools.

Perhaps that's too convoluted for your eyeballs. Here's the same chart but with average rankings over the previous 6 years.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY YA'LL!