Arizona football lands commitment from big New Mexico DL Tylen Gonzalez

The 2023 recruiting cycle has kicked into overdrive as official visit time has hit the Arizona Wildcats.

Last year, Jedd Fisch and UA were extremely successful utilizing June official visits to build their strong 2022 class. And they are well on their way to building their 2023 class in the same fashion.

The first official visit weekend was incredibly successful and one of the new additions was Tylen Gonzalez.

Gonzalez, who is a dual-sport athlete at Carlsbad (N.M.) High School, is an intriguing prospect. He was relatively unknown until very recently but Arizona has been on him hard. He has fantastic size at 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds and has plenty of room to add more muscle. He moves very well for someone his size and has impressive strength as well. He plays with a high motor, relentlessly pursuing the ball carrier.

Gonzalez doesn’t have any other known offers, though he does have schools pursuing him such as Washington and UCLA. He doesn’t have a big social media presence and is kind of tucked away, so it’s been difficult to track him.

Gonzalez is the first New Mexico prospect to commit to Arizona since Calvin Allen in 2012.

He doesn’t have a ranking on 247Sports yet and he doesn’t have any stats on MaxPreps, but the former figures to change with news breaking of his commitment.

See below for a couple of highlights during his junior season.

Arizona now has five known commitments in the 2023 recruiting class, but that number figures to jump in the next few days since Fisch has been sending out numerous iterations of his dancing cactus gif tweets that signify a commitment.