Roster breakdown

UCLA's roster is built older and with more blue-chip talent than ours — 60% upperclassmen against our 43%, and 26% blue-chip rate against our 17%, with an average of 3.27 stars on matched players versus our 3.18 — suggesting DeShaun Foster has leaned on recruiting quality over volume and let the room mature. The transfer picture is a blind spot since the site publishes no prior schools, so we can't quantify portal reliance the way we can Maryland's 32 transfers at 29%. Retention looks shakier than it reads: 51% of the roster is SR/GR, meaning roughly 61 players walk out the door after this season, and the OL (298 lbs avg) and DL (283 lbs avg) are both lighter than our guys at 314 lbs on both lines, which is a size gap worth noting for the trenches. On the DMV angle, six players on their roster have local ties — Ellis, West, Lovett, Sweazie, Gobaira, Hendrick — with two listed from Maryland specifically, so there's pipeline overlap we should be tracking heading into 2026 recruiting given that cliff they're about to hit.