bruinmike

Ugh I hate that site. It's such a cesspool and it makes neutrals think that UCLA fans are all that stupid.

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But the author of that SB Nation article said WE were desperate. I guess not desperate enough to send the whole staff to a basketball a couple thousand miles away.

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Bruins Nation is probably the worst place to get UCLA "news". It's an opinion blog that's the equivalent of the Fox News of the UCLA online community. I'll say this: if LSU/Cameron's move works, then it's brilliant and worth whatever minor violation could come of it. If the kids resent the perception of having a minder from LSU on their trip and it backfires, then it's not brilliant.

At the end of the day, recruiting is like a hot dog. You hopefully enjoy the outcome, but the process that went into making it possible is "murky" at best. And that goes for LSU, UCLA, and damn near every other school.

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Your Mercedes Lewis argument is null and void because he is a tight end. Dupre is a wideout so lets stick to wideouts. Even then, with Brett Hundley at QB (which has been your best QB in the past decade)your leading receiver only had 700 yards on the year. We just produced 2 1000 yard receivers. I don't think UCLA would showcase a wideout the same way a Cam Cameron LSU offense would. If Dupre makes the logical pick, based on targets he will receive, LSU should be the destination.

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Our offense lacked game-breakers, due largely to the failures of previous regimes to stock the cupboards with such players, so instead of relying on big name players for big plays, our offense was predicated on spreading the ball around. I think over 20 players had catches in games this year. Hell, four defensive linemen had catches in games this year.

The vast majority of our WRs are big, possession types with limited speed, so we had to tailor our offense around that. Any big plays were designed plays to go deep that came after lulling a defense to sleep with the short stuff. I'm not sure I can remember a single play in which a WR caught a five-yard pass and turned it into a 50-yard gain with pure speed or making people miss. Our YAC numbers were abysmal because our receivers are big guys with limited wiggle.

If we get the horses, we'll let them run. We just didn't have them this year, but we're trying to change that by going after guys like Dupre.

You're right though, LSU has the track record under Cameron that UCLA doesn't. No dispute there. I'm just trying to explain why our offense was the way it was.

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The previous regimes still had the UCLA selling point to bring in big recruits and they never produced (m)any NFL wideouts. Even when LSU had its lackluster offense's, we still put a few guys in the league (LaFell, Doucet, and Randle).

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Think you're underestimating how bad UCLA's offenses were at that point, especially when you consider that UCLA's nadir coincided with the height of the Pete Carroll era at USC. Under Neuheisel, there were years when we didn't bring in even one wide receiver in the entire class. That's how much of a turn-off his system was to WRs. UCLA has only brought in two top 20 WR recruits since 2002 [link= https://ucla.scout.com/a.z?s=12&p=9&c=8&yr=2014[/link]. That's two top 20 kids, and not a single 5 star, in 12 years.

So when our system was so bad that we couldn't bring in even the raw talent to mold, then how could we produce NFL players? It just doesn't work that way. That's how bad things got at UCLA before Mora, and that's the stench he's still trying to fight off now in recruiting elite skill players.

All the guys you name checked were elite recruits, so they could have been drafted on raw talent regardless of how they did at LSU. UCLA didn't even have underperforming 5-stars at WR for a while. We've had underperforming 3-stars.

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Good, I've always had an affinity for UCLA, but please, catch up with RECRUITS from out west!!

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Haha blame the West recruiting class for being down this year. And the small pocket of elite kids we do have out here for 2014, like Adoree and Juju Smith, are Southern Cal homers who still have some fanciful notion of playing for their "dream" school stuck in their heads even as that ship sinks and capsizes right before their eyes. So we gotta find future Bruins somewhere!

Next year, I doubt you hear more than a small peep out of UCLA in the South, as 2015 is one of the best and deepest recruiting classes in the West in the last 20 years, so there won't be much need to venture out of our backyard. Bet we'll be hearing more about LSU recruiting California next year and the complaints being in reverse in the run up to Signing Day 2015 haha.