Ingredients are coming together for Bruins
UCLA FOOTBALL
Thirteen local high school players sign their letters of intent at an Inglewood restaurant. The class, with 21 recruits now in the fold, is ranked highly; Knox is still wavering, though.
In a small Inglewood strip mall, across the street from a pest control business, the core of a football recruiting class -- one that UCLA hopes will annoy plenty of opponents -- enlisted this morning.
A group of 13 Southern California players signed letters of intent with UCLA outside the Serving Spoon, a restaurant owned by the family of Bruins recruit Jerry Johnson.
"We're going to take over one city at a time," said one of them, Johnathan Franklin, a defensive back and running back from Los Angeles Dorsey High.
"When it started, whoever thought Microsoft would be as big as it is today? I see us winning Pac-10 championships. If we work hard enough, we can win a national championship. This class coming in loves football. We have a passion. We eat, sleep and breathe football all day long."
That might be needed to revive a program that has meandered in recent seasons, neither bottoming out nor soaring to great heights. But new Coach Rick Neuheisel, hired Dec. 29, inherited a recruiting class ranked by most experts as in or near the national top 10. UCLA had received letters of intent from 21 recruits by noon, and junior college quarterback Tom Craft has filed grant-in-aid paperwork.
The impact on a 6-7 team that lost 25 seniors, including 19 starters, will take time. But those who signed up today saw this as a starting point.
"We're the ones who are starting over with a new coach," said Damien Holmes, a defensive end from Colton High. "We're what they will write and what they will say about UCLA. We have a chance to bring them back."
So far, the Bruins' recruiting class is ranked seventh by Scout.com and 13th by Rivals.com. That may rise or fall with a decision by Milton Knox, a running back from Lake Balboa Birmingham, who made an oral commitment to UCLA last year but took a recruiting trip to Notre Dame last weekend.
Uona Kaveinga, a linebacker from Lawndale Leuzinger, appeared headed elsewhere. He had committed to UCLA, then switched to Brigham Young University, but early this afternoon it was not clear where he would land.
Even without him--and possibly without Knox--the Bruins' harvest is considered one of the program's best in a decade, having stayed mostly intact even after Coach Karl Dorrell was fired on Dec. 3.
"It is a great class," Neuheisel said last week. "These kids bought into the idea of UCLA and in unique way they bonded with each other. . . . It is a group that wanted to come together and do something special with one another."
