Blue-chip ratio: Which college football teams have championship-grade recruiting?
"The 11 blue-chip programs
Let's first look at the 11 schools who've signed more blue-chips than non-blue-chips over the last four classes. Six play in the Southeast (five SEC teams and one ACC), which is unsurprising, considering that region of the country is far more talented than any other.
The 2014 national champion will likely come from among these 11 schools. After all, every national championship since 2002 has been won by programs in this list of 11."
"Florida State: 56 percent
The Noles will be strong contenders to repeat in 2014, as the odds-on favorite at 15/4.
Florida State's two-year recruiting trend is fairly flat, but Florida State fans are probably okay with that, given the crystal ball Jimbo Fisher and Jameis Winston just hoisted. It will be interesting to see what FSU does on the recruiting trail in 2014 coming off a title, as history shows that teams typically see a bump not a few weeks after winning the title, but in the year immediately following that title."
"Finally, let's take a look at each conference, with some observations on the teams we didn't already cover above."
"ACC: 16.5 percent
The ACC is a league with some heavy hitters and some real disappointments. The good thing is that nobody's fallen like Nebraska, Rutgers, or Cal have. All of the big two-year trends for ACC teams are positive. And Florida State winning a title might help to counteract some of the negative recruiting the league faces from its SEC counterparts, who occupy much of the same footprint.
We talk about the player development and scouting at Michigan State and Baylor, but Duke winning the ACC Coastal with zero blue-chips on its roster is something to behold. History says that's not sustainable, and while Duke is probably getting a higher quality of three-star than it used to get (something this measure is not designed to register), it's still not popular with top recruits. It is nowhere close to becoming Stanford East.
While Miami is a long way off from having a championship roster, its improvement in 2013-2014 compared to 2011-2012 is very impressive. Many believe Miami reached for players in the class of 2012 who were not Miami quality, simply to have a full roster in case the NCAA came down hard. With NCAA sanctions being extremely light, Miami's recruiting is on the way back up. In the 2011-2012 classes, Miami signed 40 players who were not blue-chips. In 2013-2014? Just 28.
Not everyone can be Texas A&M. Like Utah, Colorado, TCU, Missouri, and Nebraska, the move to a new conference has not yet had a quantifiable impact on recruiting for Pitt and Syracuse.
The hope is that Louisville will be more like Texas A&M. Unfortunately for the ACC, Charlie Strong's departure turned what would be likely been Louisville's best class in quite a while (off back-to-back great years) into its worst in a four-year stretch. Maryland, the team that Louisville is replacing, has more recruiting momentum. After signing just 38 players in the last two years, if Louisville were to surprise with a 10-win season in its first year in the ACC, it would be in position to capitalize and take a big, impactful class.
Mike London has the recruiting side of things down pat, but he could be running short on time to win.
Georgia Tech's defeatist recruiting is a drain on the ACC's talent. Elite players simply do not want to play in that offense. To have the ACC's only Georgia school forfeiting all of Atlanta's elite players to SEC schools is a major negative."
"Recruiting rankings are quite good at predicting the teams that will be at the top of college football.
But have recruiting rankings improved that much over time? The experts say yes. I spoke with national recruiting directors Tom Luginbill of ESPN, Scott Kennedy of Scout.com, and JC Shurburtt of 247 Sports. Each has more than a decade in the business of ranking college football recruits.
"Oh I think they've improved a lot," said Kennedy. "The old standby is you judge based on the offers, and most of the time you're going to get them right if you go with the kid who gets the most offers, and those are usually the best players -- but that's not always.""
Be they ever so humble, the rankings (still) get it right
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'Big Six' Conference Teams by Recruiting Class
• FIVE-STAR: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas.
• FIVE-STAR: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas.
Note that, since 2003, the eleven teams in the "five-star" group have combined for 21 appearances in the BCS Championship game, compared to one appearance by any of the 64 teams listed below. (The lone exception in that span, Oregon, just barely missed the cut for five-star status.) The only "five-star" teams that never played for a title in the BCS era are Georgia and Michigan; among the rest, only Notre Dame failed to make a repeat trip.
• FOUR-STAR: Arkansas, California, Clemson, Miami, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ole Miss, Oregon, Penn State, South Carolina, Stanford, Tennessee, Texas A&M, UCLA, Virginia Tech, Washington.
• THREE-STAR: Arizona, Arizona State, Baylor, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisville, Maryland, Michigan State, Mississippi State, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, TCU, Texas Tech, Vanderbilt, Virginia, West Virginia.
• TWO-STAR: BYU, Cincinnati, Colorado, Georgia Tech, Houston, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, N.C. State, Northwestern, Purdue, South Florida, Utah, Washington State, Wisconsin.
• ONE-STAR: Boise State, Boston College, Central Florida, Connecticut, Duke, Iowa State, Kansas State, Memphis, SMU, Syracuse, Temple, Wake Forest.
Over the same four-year span, those 75 teams played head-to-head 1,488 times. Here are the results of those games, with winning records in black and losing records in red:
To describe those results as "compelling" would be selling them short. It's a landslide. On the final count, the higher-ranked team according to the recruiting rankings won roughly two-thirds of the time, and every "class" as a whole had a winning record against every class ranked below it every single year. (The only exception came last year, when "three-star" teams came up short in head-to-head meetings with "one-star" teams. Otherwise, the hierarchy held across every line.) The gap on the field also widened with the gap in the recruiting scores: While "one-star" recruiting teams fared slightly better against blue-chip opponents than "two-star" teams, both groups combined managed a grand total of 19 wins over "five-star" opponents in 112 tries. Broadly speaking, the final results on the field broke along a straight line demarcated on signing day."
"The evidence is overwhelming: Despite some obvious, anecdotal exceptions, on the whole recruiting rankings clearly are useful for creating a realistic baseline for expectations. But the narrower your focus, the less useful they will become.
The massively hyped, five-star recruit headlining your team's next recruiting class may be an irredeemable bust; he is also many times more likely than a scrappy three-star to pan out as an All-American and move on to the next level. Somewhere, an under-scouted afterthought with a chip on his shoulder will almost certainly go on to defy the odds, become a star and maybe win the Heisman Trophy. But that doesn't change the odds, which are against him becoming anything more than an obscure role player, at best. Inevitably, a team full of afterthoughts at the bottom of the rankings will defy the odds, catch fire, pull a few upsets and storm its way into a BCS bowl. But that doesn't change the odds, which are in favor of the same team dwindling on the edge of bowl eligibility. And just as inevitably, the eventual national champion will emerge from the ranks of the handful of teams that consistently come on signing day."
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