Mel Tucker Has It Rolling in Recruiting
Louisiana running back Ashaad Clayton, a Rivals.com Top 100 prospect, chose Colorado over Georgia, LSU and Alabama on Monday.
That alone is a huge grab, but it's not alone.
Colorado has 19 commitments for the 2010 class, which ranks 33rd in the country and doesn't include Alabama defensive end Antonio Alfano, a former five-star prospect.
If this holds up, it would be Colorado's best recruiting class since 2017, when it ranked 32nd, led by four-star prospects K.D. Nixon and Jake Moretti. Odds are, with several scholarships left to give, this class keeps rising (the 2017 group had 28 players in it).
CU hasn't had a Top 25 recruiting class since 2008, when it ranked 15th in large part because of another top-tier running back. That time it was Darrell Scott, the top running back in the country, along with six four-star prospects in a relatively small class (19).
So when you throw in a few more players and if you count Alfano in the mix, this is the best recruiting season Colorado has had in more than a decade.
Obviously, that's one of the main reasons you hire Mel Tucker. Seven of the 19 commitments are from the heart of SEC country (that's not including the six Texans), where Tucker spent the previous four years as an assistant at Alabama and Georgia. The hope was that his pre-existing relationships in the south would help bring that flavor to Colorado, and that's exactly what has happened so far.
Colorado needed a big recruiting class for all the usual reasons. But beyond that, most of the core players on this team will be gone next season. There's a big rebuild upcoming, and the way college football moves these days, Tucker couldn't afford to have a dud class.
This is all on paper at this point, but this class is about as much as Colorado could have asked for. And if recruiting does, in fact, have a momentum to it, this class is going to get even better.