{"id":4210,"date":"2021-02-23T14:49:54","date_gmt":"2021-02-23T19:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gridironstuds.com\/blog\/?p=4210"},"modified":"2021-02-23T15:59:23","modified_gmt":"2021-02-23T20:59:23","slug":"recruiting-class-rank-vs-on-field-performance-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/recruiting-class-rank-vs-on-field-performance-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Recruiting Class Rank vs. On Field Performance 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Chad Wilson – GridironStuds Blog<\/strong>
\nTwitter: @GridironStuds<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Recruit, recruit, recruit.\u00a0 That’s all you hear in the World of college football these days.\u00a0 One would start thinking that nothing else matters in the sport anymore besides landing those 5 and 4 star recruits each cycle.\u00a0 How true was that for the season 2020?\u00a0 This article takes a look.<\/p>\n

For the purposes of this study we are evaluating the 2020 seasons final Top 10 Ap results.\u00a0 We all know that once again,\u00a0 Alabama was crowned king.\u00a0 To evaluate the 2020 season,\u00a0 I went back and looked at the recruiting class rankings for 2017.\u00a0 Why 2017?\u00a0 Well, the majority of the starters and key contributors to a football team are athletes that are in their 4th year in the program.\u00a0 As much as we love incoming freshmen,\u00a0 popped up on the scene sophomores and ready to go to the league juniors,\u00a0 the truth of the matter is that most football teams are anchored by their redshirt juniors and true seniors.<\/p>\n

I did a similar study in 2008 (yes,\u00a0 GridironStuds has been around for a minute) and the results were very interesting. In that previous study which took three seasons of performance,\u00a0 two out of the three years,\u00a0 the national champion came from a program that finished in the Top 3 in recruiting rank four years earlier.<\/p>\n

We almost have to cut Alabama out of studies like this at this point.\u00a0 My previous study took into account the 2006-2008 college football seasons.\u00a0 At the time,\u00a0 Nick Saban had not yet started his evil Crimson Tide empire.\u00a0 Since then,\u00a0 he has turned college football on it’s ear and has dominated like no other.\u00a0 \u00a0With that said,\u00a0 let’s just get this out of the way.\u00a0 Alabama had the #1 ranked recruiting class in 2017 and even the late Ray Charles standing next to Stevie Wonder can recognize that this class paid off handsomely for Saban.\u00a0 By 247 Sports standards,\u00a0 Saban’s 2017 haul was the third best recruiting class of all time.\u00a0 On a side note,\u00a0 247 Sports did not exist the last time that I did this study.\u00a0 247 Sports,\u00a0 like Alabama,\u00a0 has helped to change college football.\u00a0 For this study,\u00a0 I used the rankings from 247 Sports.<\/p>\n

Now that we got Alabama out of the way,\u00a0 let’s take a look at how the rest the Top 10 and college football did with regards to recruiting and on field performance.\u00a0 What was interesting to note was that out of the Top 10 teams in the final 2020 AP poll, half did not have a top 10 recruiting class in 2017.\u00a0 What’s even wilder is that three of these teams did not have a class that ranked in the top 40.\u00a0 If you believe that recruiting is the key to success then you have to be amazed by the coaching jobs by Luke Fickell at Cincinnati who was working with a 63rd ranked 2017 class,\u00a0 Matt Campbell at Iowa St. who was kicking heads in with a 52 ranked class in Ames and Pat Fitzgerald who marched all the way to the Big 10 Championship game armed with the 50th ranked 2017 recruiting class.\u00a0 To say they overachieved would be an overachievement of understatements.<\/p>\n

Who underachieved though?\u00a0 I know that’s what you hungry internet wolves are looking for.\u00a0 Top ten 2017 recruiting classes that failed to make the Top 10 in the AP Poll were USC, Michigan, LSU, Auburn and FSU.\u00a0 The Seminoles who had the 6th ranked class,\u00a0 not only finished out of the Top 25 but ended the year with a losing record at 3-6 in Mike Norvell’s first season.\u00a0 Call it poor coaching if you will but the truth of the matter is that Norvell was the 3rd coach to touch that 2017 FSU class.\u00a0 The man who brought it in,\u00a0 Jimbo Fisher,\u00a0 enjoyed a banner year at Texas A&M.\u00a0 Too much turnover will do in any program.\u00a0 As for others who failed to cash in on their Top 10 classes,\u00a0 Michigan extended Jim Harbaugh after his team went 2-4.\u00a0 Auburn fired Gus Malzahn when he went 6-4 falling short of the lofty expectations from the “other” school in Alabama.\u00a0 LSU was treated to a horrific season after having historic success in 2019 and USC made it to the Pac-12 championship game for the first time since the 2017 season.<\/p>\n

One final note before I go.\u00a0 Two teams made the Top 5 of the final top 25 AP poll without the benefit of a top ten 2017 class.\u00a0 Clemson finished third in the final rankings but in 2017 they only managed to put together a 16th ranked class.\u00a0 We can not overlook in any way the tremendous coaching job Dabo Swinney has been able to do.\u00a0 \u00a0When I last did this study in 2008,\u00a0 Swinney ended the year as the interim coach for the Tigers.\u00a0 The other team in the top 5 was the aforementioned Jimbo Fisher’s Texas A&M team who finished fourth with the tools of a 13th ranked 2017 class.\u00a0 That Aggie 2017 class was pulled in by Kevin Sumlin who is now out of coaching after getting let go by Arizona.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see what Fisher does at A&M when his own recruits are in play.<\/p>\n

The table listed below,\u00a0 lays it all for you.\u00a0 To the left is the recruiting ranking from 2017 and to the right is the final top 10 from the 2020 AP poll.\u00a0 Any number in parenthesis shows the rank of that team’s 2017 class.\u00a0 UR stands for “Unranked”.<\/em><\/p>\n

Recruiting Rank vs. On Field Performance for 2020 CFB Season<\/strong><\/p>\n

[table id=10 \/]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Chad Wilson – GridironStuds Blog Twitter: @GridironStuds Recruit, recruit, recruit.\u00a0 That’s all you hear in the World<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":4218,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[878,1100,521,1096],"class_list":["post-4210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-clemson","tag-jimbo-fisher","tag-ohio-st","tag-recruiting-ranking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gridironstuds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}