Recruiting Impact: Malcolm Lamar

To say that Oregon recruiting on a roll is an understatement. Last week they held their inaugural Saturday Night Live football camp bringing together dozens of elite football prospects from across the nation. The dividends from that weekend have been enormous.

With the addition of Seffner (Fla.) Armwood strongside defensive end Malcolm Lamar yesterday, Willie Taggart and company have now landed seven attendees from the event.

Lamar is rated as the No. 22 SDE prospect in the nation because he has great athleticism for his size. At 6-foot-5, 256-pounds as a rising senior, Lamar has a prototypical college DL frame. Added to that, Lamar moves very well for a big man and has the potential to reshape his physique into top D-1 form relatively easily.

He is a relentless pass rusher who uses his quickness to shoot through gaps and attack the ball-carrier, and can play both the three- and five- techniques.

This latest commitment may well be the end of defensive line recruiting for the Class of 2018. Lamar joins Tampa DE Jonathan King and Yuma (Ariz.) DT Mohamed Diallo as commits to this class, and three DL matches our projected number for the cycle.

In fact, the entire class is filling up. Our current projections are for a class size of about 28 this year. With 22 in the fold already and six months left before the normal February signing day, it is becoming more and more likely that the Duck recruiting class of 2018 will be completely full at that time.

When Oregon hired Willie Taggart from his head coaching position at South Florida last December, it seemed natural that some of the athletes he had been recruiting in the Sunshine State would become targets in Eugene. After all, he had about two months before National signing day to put most of the 2017 class together.

Indeed, the Ducks ended up signing seven Floridians last year, all of them committing to Oregon after the Taggart hire. This year Taggart and staff are doing it again. Lamar becomes the fourth Florida prospect to commit to the flock, the eleventh in the last two cycles.

Three of them are from Armwood high school. Last year it was wide receiver Darrian McNeal. In June wide receiver teammate Warren Thompson made his Duck pledge. Now Lamar makes the third player destined for the Oregon roster from the powerful prep program. A pipeline-within-a-pipeline.

The commitment of Malcolm Lamar is an indication of the strength of Oregon recruiting under Willie Taggart. After clawing together the nation’s No. 18-ranked class last year with less than two months to work with, he has the current class ranked No. 5 in the nation.

And it is national strength. This commitment, like the other 11 Florida prospects in the last two years, was plucked straight out of SEC-country. Lamar had offers from Alabama, Florida, Miami, all of the big southeast programs.

In the last week the Ducks added eight commitments counting the one to the Class of 2019: Three from Texas and one each from California, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida and Oregon. The definition of national recruiting.