UCLA Football Recruiting: Previewing The January 15th Official Visitors

With the bowl season recruiting dead period finally over, UCLA football recruiting is warming up as the Bruin coaches get ready to host the first of three sets of official visitors during the final sprint to National Signing Day 2016.

Only three weekends stand between now and National Signing Day on Wednesday, February 3^rd, so it is imperative that UCLA maximizes each of those weekends by bringing in recruits on official visits that it has a genuine chance of convincing to becoming Bruins.

Per 24/7 Sports’s Official Visitors list and social media, UCLA will be hosting four key targets this upcoming weekend who are all high-end players at positions of need. When Go Joe Bruin did its first edition of the Recruiting Big Boards a few weeks ago, none of the four seemed like realistic targets; hence, the lack of attention or even mention given to any of them. However, as college football fans know all too well at this point, recruiting is a topsy-turvy process that changes by the minute, so it is no surprise that a few players have come from off the radar to present themselves as possible UCLA commits with Signing Day approaching.

*NOTE: Thanks to Twitter, we also know UCLA is hosting one of its verbally committed players (and most lively social media recruiters), 3-star tight end Jordan Wilson, but we’re going to focus in this piece on the recruits who the UCLA coaches are trying to add to the class alongside Wilson.

UCLA Bruins

If only because of the dearth of warm bodies on the positional depth chart, the most notable official visitor this weekend is 4-star QB Devon Modster (Rancho Santa Margarita, CA/Tesoro). Modster was a player we profiled on Go Joe Bruin in the spring, but he shocked Pac-12 recruiting followers when he spurned UCLA for Arizona. However, he has since decommitted from the Wildcats and is back in play for the Bruins. He is also considering Oklahoma State and Syracuse at the moment.

If Modster impresses the coaches physically and mentally on the official visit, then there is a very good chance UCLA gives him the chance to commit to the local school and he takes it, joining Matt Lynch and Dymond Lee as incoming QBs in the 2016 UCLA football recruiting class.

UCLA is also getting an official visit from a player who is probably its highest-priority target on the offensive line in the run-up to Signing Day in 3-star lineman Francisco Perez (Baldwin Park, CA/Baldwin Park).

An athletic and explosive mauler at the point of attack, Perez is the kind of lineman who embodies the shift to a power-oriented offense that UCLA is looking for under the leadership of new offensive coordinator Kennedy Polamalu. Perez committed to Cal over the summer and remains committed to the Golden Bears at the moment, but with UCLA offensive line coach and ace recruiter Adrian Klemm running point in UCLA’s recruitment of Perez, we’d give the Bruins a great shot to flip the local big boy to Westwood.

The other two official visitors are players who would give the Bruins some very talented pieces on the defensive side of the ball. The first one, coming all the way from the East Coast, is 4-star athlete Aaron Hansford (St. John’s College/Washington, DC). Hansford had a tremendous senior season playing both wide receiver and linebacker, but his best position in college is probably linebacker, where he wowed the coaches and observers of the Under Armour All-American Game a couple week ago with his instincts and athleticism.

However, interestingly, UCLA is recruiting him as a wide receiver and it’s the fact that the Bruin coaches were the first staff willing to let him try wide receiver first in college that has kept UCLA so high on his list. To use a sentence regular readers of Go Joe Bruin will be very familiar with, Hansford is one of those players who UCLA will be happy to get on campus first and ask questions about the position he’ll end up playing later.

And last but certainly not least, UCLA will be having local 3-star cornerback Kentrell Love (Corona, CA/Centennial) on campus as an official visitor this weekend. When discussing cornerback recruiting in the last Defensive Recruiting Big Board, we were very critical of how UCLA had approached the position in this recruiting cycle. However, since that piece was published, the Bruins have gone out and found a viable and talented option at cornerback in Love, who had an incredible senior season that boosted his recruiting stock tremendously and whose current star rating woefully underrates his talent and upside.

At 6-feet-2-inches, Love fits the tall, fluid, and long-limbed prototype that UCLA defensive backs coach Demetrice Martin prioritizes in his corners. Love also might be the most physical high-school cornerback you will ever see, as, unlike most corners, he absolutely loves to come up in run support and lay a beating on opposing ball carriers.

Next: UCLA Football Recruiting: 2016 Defensive Big Board 1.0

Although he is currently committed to Washington and grew up a USC fan, Love is rumored to be very heavily considering switching his commitment to UCLA after his official visit, as it is a more local option than Washington and a more stable option coaching-wise than USC at the moment. As his senior highlight film makes abundantly clear, flipping Love from the Huskies would be a tremendous coup for Martin and the Bruins, as it would give them the kind of elite talent at corner that UCLA covets and needs to take its secondary from good to great in the future: