Spaziani: Reason To Be Excited About Class Of '16

While many people like to focus on how many stars a certain college football recruit may have, head coach Frank Spaziani prefers to look at a little bit of history.

This Sunday, six Boston College alumni will be represented on Super Bowl rosters. One of those alumni was a four-star recruit, four were three-star recruits, and the other was just a two-star recruit.

With that in mind, Spaziani announced yesterday the 16 newest Eagles for the 2016 recruiting class.

"Obviously, it's an important day for college football teams," Spaziani said. "Significant. You only find out in four or five years how important it was or how good it was. But we're excited today about our signees."

"There are few things that excite the fan base more than thinking about a blue-chip recruiting class and how it's going to affect your football program. And I can tell you this: we're very excited about the 16 that we've signed."

Spaziani went on to talk about the various ways to evaluate a recruiting class, citing ESPN, Rivals, and Scout, among others, who give players a certain star value. Instead of looking at those stars, Spaziani and his coaching staff use a more in-depth way to look at a recruit.

"There's a lot of other ways to evaluate a recruiting class," he said. "A couple things I would point out is we have six players on the Super Bowl rosters for the game coming up this Sunday. Six BC players."

"When we brought those young men [the alumni in the Super Bowl] in, we evaluated them, we evaluated their talent, we developed them, and we didn't make them into anything they couldn't be. But they developed into the players they are today."

"So this recruiting class, the 16 players we have in this recruiting class, the 21 that we took last year, and the 18 before, were evaluated under the same microscope and the same guidelines that evaluated those six. Now, I'm not saying these 16 are going to turn out to be all on Super Bowl rosters. But the point is we evaluate them the same way, we plan to develop them, and we plan to find out just how good they are. That's how we evaluate our class. We're excited about it."

The class is composed of three offensive linemen, three wide receivers, two tight ends, four linebackers, three defensive backs, and a defensive end.

The offensive linemen—Jim Cashman, Win Homer, and Frank Taylor—may be one of the highlights of the class. Cashman is a 6-foot-7, 275 pounder, Homer a 6-foot-5 245 pounder, and Taylor a 6-foot-3 285 pounder.

Meanwhile, tight end Mike Giacone was a late commit, decommitting from Rutgers when head coach Greg Schiano left for the NFL, and commiting to BC instead.

"We had targeted Michael long ago," Spaziani said. "We had worked very hard on him, and it's never over till it's over. We're very happy that he joined us, and that was a big addition at the end in a position that we're very excited about to have."

On the defensive side, linebackers Steven Daniels and Mike Strizak come in as highly regarded recruits. Daniels, who went to St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati (the same school Luke Kuechly attended), played at Worcester Academy in Mass. last year, as he needed to become academically eligible for BC. Spaziani said he is "very optimistic" that Daniels will be on the team come September.

"Hopefully, he'll complete what he has to complete," Spaziani said. "He's working hard at it. He's a great kid, and he's got great support. We may know some news here early on."

Two recruits have already enrolled and are on campus—wide outs Marcus Grant and Karim Zoungrana.

While a popular view of National Signing Day is a recruit deciding between his choice of top-notch colleges, Spaziani said they usually don't go after those kinds of players.

"We didn't have any guys with five hats in front of them," Spaziani said. "That's usually not our style. We try to tattoo them early and make sure they stay on."

Many schools that had top-25 recruiting classes did so by getting flashy four or five-star recruits who made headlines in high school. Spaziani preferred to see recruits in another light.

"The other parameters that we work on here is the total person, the total recruiting class," Spaziani said. "We have academic standards that we adhere to, and we use it as a plus. As a coaching staff and an administration, we don't view it as a minus. It's a plus. We have certain qualifications that we want in our athletes as far as citizens. We have eight captains. I think we have two valedictorians. And oh, by the way, they're good football players too. Those are the type of people that we're recruiting, and those are the ones we feel we can develop."

"Those six guys I mentioned earlier [the Super Bowl alumni]—they had all of those qualifications too."

The class is rounded out by wide receiver Harrison Jackson, tight end Dan Crimmins, linebackers Tim Joy and Bobby Wolford, defensive backs David Dudeck, Bryce Jones, and Justin Simmons, and defensive end Malachi Moore.