Those of you who recall the earliest days of the Big 12 Conference will remember one Byron Hanspard, a running back for Texas Tech from 1994-1996 that rushed for more than 2,000 yards in his junior season as a Red Raider en route to winning the Doak Walker Award, being named a unanimous First-Team All American, and getting drafted in the second round.

Turns out that he’s got a son that also hails from the DeSoto area near Dallas, and that son has just announced that he’s the 20th commitment in Baylor’s 2018 recruiting class. Like many of Baylor’s commitments, Hanspard plans to take advantage of the early signing period to send in his national letter of intent next week (12/20, to be precise). Originally an Arkansas commit until Bret Bielema got fired, Hanspard took his official visit to Waco this past weekend before hosting our coaching staff last night in his home. Not coincidentally, there were a couple of interesting tweets (each word is a link there) around that time from people in attendance.

Listed as an “athlete” in his 247Sports profile, where he is a 4* with a 90.15 rating (and now officially our highest-rated recruit of this class so far), Hanspard will likely play defensive back at Baylor. Everywhere I’ve seen says corner, actually. He is slated to play in the Under Armour All-American Game early next year and has offers from, among others, Arkansas, Oregon, Ole Miss, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Mississippi State, and Houston.

Hanspard gives Baylor 20 commits now going into the last week before the quiet period starts on December 17 and the dead period starts the next day and goes through January 11, 2017. One note on that for those who don’t remember the crazy rules (and who would?), players that sign a financial aid agreement with a school have unlimited contact even during dead periods. Casey Phillips did that earlier today. Considering this is the first year of the early signing period, I would assume that extends to recruits that sign on December 20, too, but I haven’t looked it up.

Since I’m going to be putting together a new monthly recruiting post (yeah, I know I said I’d do it a while ago, sorry), here’s a list of where we are with the 2018 class at this point. Please note that the national and conference rankings, and the average rating, may not be updated yet from the time Hanspard committed.

National Rank: 31 | Big-12 Rank: 6 | Avg Rating: 0.8604

OFFENSE:

RB: Stanley Hackett
RB: Craig Williams
RB/WR: Joshua Fleeks
WR: Kalon Barnes
WR: Jackson Gleeson
TE: Bralen Taylor
TE: Christoph Henle
TE: Ben Sims
OL: Casey Phillips
OL: Ylijaah Hall
OL: Jackson Kimble
OL: Connor Galvin

DEFENSE:

DT: Joshua Landry
DE: Marje Smith
LB: Joseph Ogunbanjo
NB/S: Christian Morgan
S: JT Woods
CB: Mark Milton
CB: BJ Hanspard

SPECIAL TEAMS:

P: Issac Power