UCLA Football Recruiting: Bruins Extend Scholarship Offers to 19 More

Earlier this week, UCLA announced that they are going to implement a program called #8CLAP8TH where they will extend scholarship offers to a bunch of recruits on the 8th day of every month. This raised a lot of questions, probably more questions than it answered, but it did get everybody talking about UCLA’s offers yesterday.

Of course, UCLA is not allowed to publicly discuss a recruit. So, everyone is relying on recruiting to announce that they received an offer from the Bruins. But, in this day and age, an offer from one school usually results in offers from other schools. So, with a high-profile program like UCLA’s, recruits will almost definitely share the news of their offer.

So, let’s take a look at what UCLA has done to start to building the Bruins’ 2020 recruiting class to this point.

As best as I can tell, the Bruins extended 19 offers yesterday. The offers look to break down this way. Eight of the recruits are rated as four-star recruits while ten of them are rated as three-star recruits. One of the recruits, TJ Bass from Butte College in northern California, is unrated and was unrated before heading to that JC.

But, if we want a true picture of the state of the 2020 recruiting class at any point, we need to know what players have already been offered to this point.

So, I also compiled a list of other players who have been offered prior to yesterday’s recruiting event.

Now, that we know to whom Chip Kelly and the Bruins have made offers, let’s break down some numbers on this because, frankly, that’s about all we can do right now.

The good news is that, in total, UCLA has already extended 63 offers to recruits. Given that UCLA had only extended 76 offers for the 2019 recruiting class by the first day of the Early Signing Period, this is a massive improvement. It would seem that the Bruins will blow that number out of the water in 2020. I think it’s possible at this point that UCLA will extend at least 150 to 175 offers between now and the start of the Early Signing Period in December.

For comparison, here, again, are the number of offers from a lot of your major programs as of the start of the Early Signing Period this past December.

So, in terms of sheer numbers, things seem better. Now, what about the quality of these offers? Well, that’s the other great news.

February not withstanding, most of the offers that have been extended so far have been made to blue chip recruits. In fact, 42 of the 63 offers are blue chip recruits. So, 67% of the offers UCLA has made are were made to blue chip recruits.

Of course, now comes the hard part.

UCLA needs to actually get these kids to sign and they need to do it in an approximate proportion to the offer distribution so far. If only a few of the 42 offered blue chip recruits decide they want to come to Westwood, there is a problem. But if at least half of the kids who ultimately decide to play for the Bruins are blue chip recruits, then things will definitely be moving in the right direction.

Unfortunately, no one who received an offer yesterday or before yesterday has stepped up yet and decided to commit to the Bruins, but, considering the 2019 recruiting cycle just wrapped up, I’m not too worried about that at this point.

As long as the coaching staff stays in contact with these kids on a regular basis, I have no doubt that the 2020 UCLA football recruiting class will be ranked a lot higher than the 2019 class.


Go Bruins!!!