30 Gopher Football Recruits in Town as Fleck Looks to Finish 2019 Class Strong

Daniel Faalele Commits to Gophers at #eLITe18Palooza in 2017 in December 2017 -- PHOTO: @danielfaalele_ - Twitter

Daniel Faalele Commits to Gophers at #eLITe18Palooza in 2017 in December 2017 — PHOTO: @danielfaalele_ – Twitter



Wow, what a huge weekend for Gopher Football. With about 4(ish) 2019 slots still available, PJ Fleck is hosting 30-ish recruits on official visits this weekend. It’s a party. The last official count I saw was 28. We will see them all over the Twin Cities, as they travel all about town for different events. It’s the #TwinCitiesTakeover.

Fleck is making this an annual event. If you remember last year, around this time, PJ and Co. hosted the #eLITe18Palooza which 247Sports noted at the time, as possibly the biggest recruiting event they’d ever heard of.

And the event paid off in LARGE manner when its two highest-rated (and possibly largest in weight) commitments of the class jumped into the boat. Fleck ended up pulling Faalele’s redshirt and he played a big part in turning around 2019 when inserted into the lineup full-time.:

Fleck has big things on his mind for 2019 as well.

The 2019 class is lagging slightly behind it’s 2018 big brother. However, a big weekend could really close that gap (especially after some recent updates on one of the major ranking websites. Stay close to our site today because I will have more on this later today).

To reiterate, we have 4 openings in the 2019 class according to insider, Kyle Goblirsch ( from GopherIllustrated.com‘s message boards). With some maneuvering, there could be room for a couple more.


— Quick Plug — 

If you are not subscribed to GopherIllustrated.com and you are a Minnesota Gopher fan of any major sport, you are missing out in ways you don’t even know. I do not plug other sites that don’t sponsor or partner with us often but, as an avid fan myself, I feel I would be doing our readers a disservice by not pushing you there while they have a 7-day free trial right now. “GI” has by far the most in-depth coverage on the maroon and gold and their message board is worth the cost of the subscription by itself. 


Here are some of the confirmed (non-committed) recruits that are arriving in the Twin Cities and on campus as I type (according to insider Ryan Burns — again over at GI):

These are probably the 4 highest-rated recruits that will be here this weekend, thus likely the most highly coveted. The vibes I get from the message boards over at GI and from Ryan’s preview article on the weekend, are that Cheney seems to be the most in the boat out of these four.

Houston is recently de-committed from Texas. He’d be a HUGE land for PJ, who already has a host of very talented young receivers. Hookfin looks like he will be a tough fish to land. Another big-time offensive line commitment would make that a strong-point early in PJ’s time recruiting for the Gophers, even if he has missed on a couple of the top MN prospects at that position.

Targeting a JUCO Defensive Backs:

It’s clear, when you look at the visitor list for the weekend, that the team is targeting a JUCO DB to pull out of this visit and into the class of 2019. That makes sense, after their youth in the secondary was exposed throughout 2018. Winfield’s injury put a microscope on it. I would expect at least one of these three to be in the boat by the end of the weekend.

The last visitor I will mention is MJ Anderson. Anderson was already committed for 2019 at one point, before de-committing recently. It’ll be interesting to see if he gets back in the boat. When a recruit de-commits, it’s pretty rare that they recommit.

There are many more recruits that will be around this weekend that I didn’t mention. You can see the rest of the list over at GopherIllustrated.com. Many of the already-committed 2019 class will also be at the #TwinCitiesTakeover.

We’ll keep you posted on what transpires from here…

Eric Strack
Minnesota Sports Fan

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