FanPost

CRN: A "Drawing Card" For UCLA

Kevin Pearson from the Press Enterprise is on a roll. Couple of days ago he did a write up on the tenacity with which CRN attacked his dream once arriving at UCLA. That was the article about CRN living out of a suitcase.

Yesterday Pearson followed up with another article on CRN and his efforts to hold on to this year's top-10 recruiting class, which experts like Biggins are calling a "minor miracle"

When UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel was going through his interview process, he was asked how much he knew about UCLA's recruiting class, and he honestly answered that he knew very little about it.


But one thing Neuheisel promised was that every player who had committed to UCLA would have his scholarship offer honored by the new coaching staff.


Most impressively in Neuheisel's five-plus weeks as UCLA's coach, nearly every recruit secured by former coach Karl Dorrell has decided to honor his commitment.

Beginning today, high school football players may sign with four-year colleges. And UCLA, which just six weeks ago had no head coach and was a program in limbo, is expected to officially sign a class that could finish in the top 10 nationally. The Bruins class is currently ranked No. 8 in the nation by scout.com.

"I wouldn't say it was a minor miracle, but it was close to that," said Greg Biggins, a StudentSports.com recruiting analyst. "Keeping everything together was amazing."

Yes KD deserves some credit for kicking off the recruiting process early, finally in his desperate fifth season. CRN is gracious enough to mention KD's contributions on putting together this class all the time. Then Walker also deservers a lot of credit for aggressively pursuing lot of the players in this class. But as Pearson mention it was CRN's "vision" that closed the deal in these last days: it was a matter of Neuheisel taking over and selling his own vision of the program as he made an in-home visit to every player during the past month, helping to secure what could be one of the Bruins' better classes in years.


"Maybe I am biased because I went here, but I think it's hard to set on UCLA and then think about going someplace else," Neuheisel said. "This place is special. Once they realized that I was one of them in terms of a guy who loved this place, and they became more comfortable with our vision in how this would take off, it became easy for them to say, 'I still like UCLA.'"


Something about that passion bucket. He makes it easy to love UCLA.

Go Bruins!!!

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of BruinsNation's (BN) editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of BN's editors.

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