BOWLING GREEN — All along, Bowling Green coach Scot Loeffler was blunt in his assessment of the Falcons’ 2020 recruiting class.
Given the bare-bones nature of the Falcons’ roster, Loeffler said many times during the previous season that Bowling Green badly needed the ’20 recruiting class to set the tone for whatever comes next.
Phase One went about as well as Bowling Green could have hoped.
On Wednesday, the Falcons officially added four more players: three-star Michigan prospects in defensive end Billie Roberts and offensive lineman Gabe Brown, plus Kentucky linebacker Jaylen Lawson and athlete Charles Rosser, their 15th Ohioan in the class. Including walk-ons and delayed scholarship players — either blueshirts or greyshirts — the Falcons added 31 new players to a roster desperately in need of reinforcements.
According to 247Sports’ composite recruiting rankings, the Falcons’ class ranks second in the Mid-American Conference. BG recruited almost exclusively close to home, with 26 of the 31 players hailing from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, or Kentucky.
“The objective was to get players in the four-hour radius with a good group of kids from outside the four-hour radius that could sustain,” Loeffler said Wednesday. “We’re convinced that we have talented players who are committed to Bowling Green, who are committed to the classroom, who are committed to their teammates, and I think this class will be the foundation of our program just like we planned on it [being] in 2018.”
After the early signing window, BG targeted additional players on both lines of scrimmage, and landed two high-caliber players in Roberts and Brown.
Roberts — whom Loeffler called “an upper-echelon, Big Ten kid” — picked BGSU against 13 other offers, including Power Five offers from Tennessee, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Kentucky, Michigan State, and Indiana, among others.
Brown was a late bloomer who did not play high school football until his senior year, but starred for Grand Rapids East Kentwood after an injury pushed him into being a starter in his lone season. The Falcons were the first on the scene for Brown’s unusual path to college football.
“They were my first Division I offer, so they weren’t waiting for anybody else to pull the trigger,” Brown said. “They saw me, they liked me, and they weren’t really worried about what anybody else did. They saw me for the player I was.”
The Falcons are just 12-36 across the past four seasons, but in Loeffler’s first year, the program’s greatest challenge — by far — was a severe lack of depth across the board.
Bowling Green finished last season with 68 scholarship players, had significantly fewer available due to injuries, and lost 15 seniors from last year’s team, making the 2020 group paramount for restocking a team with openings throughout the roster.
The crux of the class lies in six offensive linemen, five defensive linemen, and two quarterbacks, foundational positions that the Falcons believed they had to address immediately in this year’s recruiting class.
“In my opinion, there are three positions that are extremely difficult to recruit, that are extremely difficult to get right: it’s the offensive line, the defensive line, and obviously, the quarterback position,” Loeffler said. “We knew, and it was part of the plan, that we had to make a huge emphasis on bringing offensive linemen, defensive linemen, and quarterbacks.”
Further, the Falcons signed three players who cracked their all-time top 10 in the recruiting rankings era. Cornerback Deshawn Jones, Jr., quarterback Tucker Melton, and Roberts all made 247’s top 10 for BG recruits.
Seven players from the class of 2020 already are enrolled, and the Falcons did not take a transfer during this cycle. BG planned to use all of its available scholarships on high school players, and did just that when it finalized its 2020 class on Wednesday.
“There are some problems in this program that we can fix immediately and others that are going to take time,” Loeffler said. “We’re committed as a staff, as a program, and as an athletic administration to make sure that we fix those problems methodically: Do it the right way.”
First Published February 5, 2020, 6:14 p.m.
