Does UCLA's surprising top-10 recruiting class have legitimate juice or is it just fool's gold?

Lincoln Riley joins Colin Cowherd to discuss USC’s schedule and their number one recruiting class, and the development of QB Jayden Maiava.

College football recruiting is a 24/7, 365-day endeavor, but during the offseason, the discussion gets turned up another notch entirely.

Some of you more casual college football fans may be thinking May is too early to be grabbing the scalpel and dissecting a recruiting class full of verbal pledges who won't even sign their papers until December at the earliest, but you could not be more wrong.

Michigan Wolverines and Michigan State Spartans helmets are displayed before a college football game at Spartan Stadium in East Lansing, Mich., on Oct. 21, 2023. (Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images)

More often than not, how you are recruiting post-spring practice is usually a pretty solid indicator of how your class will finish in the winter.

Be forewarned, though. It takes more than just glancing at the number next to your team's logo and giving a thumbs up or thumbs down.

HOW NAME, IMAGE AND LIKENESS LAWS HAVE CHANGED COLLEGE SPORTS

Sure, it's nice to be ranked in the top 10 on recruiting sites in the month of May, but there are other factors involved when breaking down a class. Speaking of which, if you go to your favorite recruiting service and peruse the top 10, you'll see some familiar names littered throughout the page.

Recruiting mainstays like Ohio State, Notre Dame, Oklahoma and Miami, among others, are humming right along with their 2027 classes, but one logo may have stuck out to you.

That's right, the UCLA Bruins, fresh off a disastrous 3-9 season where they eventually fired head coach DeShaun Foster, are sitting all the way at No. 6 on the 247Sports composite rankings (they're 11th