Feb. 5, 2014

LAS VEGAS (UNLVRebels.com) - UNLV football head coach Bobby Hauck's fifth recruiting class at the school was announced during Wednesday's initial day of the national signing period.

2014 Signing Day Central Page

"I like our class," Hauck said. "I feel good about the ability of the junior college transfers to help us immediately and the freshmen to work their way up the depth chart and provide long-term success. We took about our normal number of JC players, which is four to six."

The list of 16 future Rebels marked the smallest recruiting class on record for the school.

"Due to the fact that we had very few scholarship seniors last season, we were able to sign a limited number of players this year and we anticipate being at our maximum number (85 scholarships) in the fall for the first time. Obviously, we had to be extremely selective in the process. We poured over hours of film in evaluating each one of these players we signed."

The list is made up of 10 high school players and six junior-college players. The group includes the program's one midyear JC signee but not the trio of grayshirts that signed previously and joined the program this semester as true freshmen (WR Devonte Boyd, LB D.J. Moffitt and WR Trent Riley).

The class is tilted toward defense with 10 defensive players, five on offense and one placekicker. The full breakdown is as follows: 5 DL, 4 DB, 2 OL, 2 QB, 1 TE, 1 LB and 1 PK.

"Our numbers on the defensive line are depleted so we needed to replenish there both with high school and JC players," Hauck said. "Big guys are hard to find but we signed a bunch we really like."

The group consists of student-athletes whose hometowns are spread among five states and one territory: five are from California, four are from Nevada, three are from Texas, two are from Arizona and one from both Washington and American Samoa.

"As always, we try to keep the locals home and I think we did that to a large degree this year as a large portion of our class is from the state of Nevada. We offered nine of the 11 players in the Valley that will sign today at FBS schools and got four of them. We also continue to have great success in recruiting in the state of Texas."

UNLV, which is coming off of the program's first trip to a bowl game since the 2000 season, will hold its spring practice from March 3-April 11.