The top-ranked safety in college football’s 2018 recruiting class will play for the Texas Longhorns after signing with Tom Herman’s squad. Angleton (Texas) product B.J. Foster gave Tom Herman’s first full recruiting class in Austin a huge boost when he verballed early this year. Foster missed some time late in his high school season with a knee injury, but returned to have an impact in his team’s playoff run which eventually fell short of a state title.
B.J. Foster signs with Texas, and Tom Herman’s building a monster recruiting class
The country’s No. 1 safety will play for Texas, which might really be building something.
Texas’ class really started to take shape in April, when Herman’s staff beat out Oklahoma for a handful of important commitments. Foster’s is arguably the biggest yet, after he picked UT over offers from Ohio State, LSU, TCU, Michigan, and scores more. Foster could’ve chosen to play more or less anywhere.
Foster is an elite athlete. He’s been laser-timed at a 4.52-second 40-yard dash, and he has the range to play as either a deep or strong safety. An injury cost Foster much of his junior season, but a strong senior year could make him the No. 1 overall player in the Lone Star State. (That’s currently cornerback Anthony Cook, from Houston.)
Foster was the 12th verbal pledge in the 2018 class for Texas at the time. He’s the second elite safety in the class, along with four-star in-state prospect (and No. 4 safety nationally) Caden Sterns. The Longhorns are building quite a wall on the back end of their defense.
Herman is an elite recruiter. That was true during his two seasons as the head coach at Houston, and it was true during a long run as an assistant before that — most recently at Ohio State. But his first signing class at Texas was transitional, after he took the job in December and had to ink players two months later. Texas had a dearth of elite talent at the top of that class, its lowest-ranked ever.
But that Herman is rebounding now is not a surprise. He’s always been good on the trail, and coaches tend to do exponentially better in their second signing class than the first. The 2017 Texas class finished ranked 26th nationally. 2018’s will beat that, and it could be a turning point for the Longhorns’ fortunes in the Big 12.
