After a fifth straight bowl win in December, The Louisiana Tech football team is looking to reload for a sixth next season, after head coach Skip Holtz’s seventh recruiting class with the Bulldogs.
This year’s haul was a relatively small one, with a class of only 16 players, including five additions on the latest Signing Day. This is partially due to the fact that there are so many student-athletes currently in the transfer portal, so Holtz wants to keep some spots available for a potential transfer.
“When you look at this class, it is not very big in recruiting terms,” Holtz said. “This May be the smallest class that we have released on Signing Day, but that also gives us five to play with. When you look at the transfer portals, there are over 1,800 players that have put their name into the transfer portal this year. I am excited about the guys we added, but there are definitely going to be more additions to this football team before we get to fall camp.”
As far as the new recruits who are already primed and ready to etch their names into Tech football history, the vast majority of them are linemen.
This was a conscious decision by Holtz, who lost two starters on the offensive line (O’Shea Dugas and Michael Rodriguez).
“When you look at it you lost both your (offensive) tackles,” Holtz said. “You lost O’Shea Dugas and Michael Rodriguez, you lost two quality backups in Shane Carpenter and Hanner Shipley. You still have guys like Gewhite Stallworth and Willie Allen, who was a younger player. But we felt like we needed some upperclassmen to step up… I didn’t want to take two freshmen, so we signed two freshmen and two upperclassmen.”
Holtz lost five seniors with playing experience on the defensive line, including NFL-bound, all-time NCAA leading sack-artist Jaylon Ferguson.
“The other position of need has been defensive line,” he said. “You go through your list, and we lost a huge list of defensive linemen. We have signed three and there are still a couple of people that we are entertaining the recruiting process with. That’s one of the positions that you could see some positions still added on the defensive line. I think those were the two biggest needs, were the O line and D line.”
A couple of the names that will fill those positions on the offensive line are junior college transfer Carter Habich and three-star offensive tackle Jonah Brewster. On the defensive line, they are hoping three-star defensive end Deshon Hall can make up for some of the pressures they’ll be losing from leaving seniors.
With senior quarterback J’mar Smith entering his final season as a Bulldog, Holtz is hopeful that three-star pro-style quarterback Jakson Thomson, from Lakelands High School in Dallas, Texas, can add some needed competition to the quarterback room.
“Having Jakson here for the Spring is going to be good and it’s going to give us more quarterbacks and give them the opportunity to go out and compete.” Holtz said.
The 16-man class included eight three-star recruits and eight two-stars, according to BleedTechBlue.com. Tech’s class is ranked 84th in the country and eighth in the Conference USA on 247sports.com, which is a drop from their ranking of 77th and fourth, respectively, last season.