Robert Rousseau of RealFootball365.com assesses the relative strengths of USC’s and UCLA’s current 2008 recruiting classes in the wake of UCLA’s upset in the 2006 rivalry game.  The reason most recruiting services rank UCLA’s 2008 class (a work in progress consisting of solely verbal commits) second nationally is that UCLA has already secured 23 verbal commitments.  USC’s 12 verbal commitments place it lower in the current top ten, but its average “star” rating is significantly higher than UCLA’s. Obviously, Pete Carroll’s USC staff is by no means finished recruiting for its 2008 class, and it traditionally finishes strong.  But in one of his arguments in favor of UCLA, Rousseau challenges the individual player rating system of the so-called experts:

We all know that recruiting is not an exact science. Thus, one has to wonder if UCLA’s plethora of four-star commits are really that far off of some of USC’s five-star wonders.

UCLA versus USC: Recruiting 2008 (RealFootball365)