When Colorado's Chris Kapilovic was brought on staff by Mel Tucker, his ability to coach guys into playing a physical brand of football was a major credential of his. As soon as he started to get to work with his players, he realized that in order to get more physical, Colorado's offensive linemen needed to first get bigger.

As for beginning to train and make progress in that regard, Kapilovic first evaluated his players in person.

"I don’t watch a ton of film from the year before before I start working with my guys," he said. "You don’t want to have any preconceived notions and have a clean slate. You do look at some [film] to get an idea...we’re pretty young — we don’t have a ton of experience. We’ve got a lot of young kids in that room [so] it just felt like we had some young guys that we needed to mold, develop and get bigger.”

Kapilovic in a sense has taken the same approach to recruiting the future of Colorado's o-line.

"We have to trust our eyes in evaluations," he said. "You can’t get carried away with stars. I don’t even want to know how many stars a kid has before I look at him. It looks good for your recruiting class and we all like that but you’ve got to go out there and trust your eyes."

Who else comes to mind in that regard quicker than three-star OL Gerad Lichtenhan, whose 6-foot-8, 345-pound frame attracted no other Power 5 offers aside from Colorado? Lichtenhan is from Davis, Calif., too, which makes his lack of Pac-12 interest all the more eyebrow-raising.

But obviously Kapilovic saw something in him, as he alludes to above, something that is moldable and developable. After all, Kapilovic pulled the trigger and offered Lichtenhan in late May and in the time between then and the latter's commitment in mid-June, obviously built up a solid rapport with him.

For Kapilovic, hitting the road and conducting evaluations seems to have three elements — and spoiler alert, two of the three you can't exactly teach.

"When I’m going out there looking at an o-lineman, first thing you see is their feet. Can they move their feet and move direction? Do they have flexibility? Back in the day when defenses would line up and just go head to head it was easy, but [now] they’re moving around and there’s some freak athletes on the d-line now, so we have to have guys who can change direction and move and be able to bend and sink your hips — [it's] is critical to that."

Once Kapilovic determines that a guy can move well enough, temperament and work ethic come into play.

[From there], you’re looking at effort [to] see a guy that can play hard, finish blocks and have an edge to them," Kapilovic said."

And finally comes size.

"We needed to get some edge and length in this class," he said. Everybody is on this quest time find these long tackles. There haven’t been as many of them in the last few years like there were, so that was the last aspect of it.”

Kapilovic seems to have found the full package in Lichtenhan, according to what he personally values in a recruit. Alongside Carson Lee and Jake Wray, CU's offensive line of the future has gotten off to an impressive start.

For those of you unfamiliar with the video below, it's a good indicator of the raw talent Lichtenhan possesses. Think what he could do with a guy like Kapilovic working with him.