CFB Playoffs Continue to Show that Recruiting Matters … a Lot

One of the primary pride points for Oklahoma State fans is that Mike Gundy and his staff do more with less. They turn top 40 recruiting classes into top 15 teams. They churn out pros that nobody thought would be pros. They are efficient and effective. This is one of the few avenues through which a non-powerhouse like OSU could ever find college football success.

However, the College Football Playoff continues to show what the BCS before it also showed: To play for and win a national championship, you have to (HAVE TO) recruit at a top 15 level. There is almost no way around this. If you don’t, your chances of getting into a playoff are slim, so the data shows, and your chances of winning it all are next to impossible.

I went back and calculated the average five-year recruiting rankings for all 16 CFB Playoff teams over the last four years. Here’s what that looks like.

The two worst teams in this group (Washington and Michigan State) got beat in the playoff by a combined score of 62-7. Not pretty. The “worst” recruiting school to play for a title of this bunch was Oregon which averaged a class ranking of 15.6 for five years from 2010-2014.

Oklahoma State’s average ranking in the last five classes: 37.

It’s a small sample size, sure, but it tells a story that has been told for decades: Only traditional juggernauts play for titles. The playoff has opened this up to non-juggernauts, but the title game remains fairly exclusive.

Part of this is a chicken or the egg thing on two different fronts. Recruiting rankings are skewed towards elite schools. If OSU offers Justice Hill, his recruiting ranking doesn’t change. If Alabama offers him, all of a sudden he might be the best back in the country.

So there’s that, but there’s also the feedback loop the committee sees. As long as they keep tossing teams in the CFP that are on the fringe but the committee thinks are good and those teams keep winning it all (see: 2017 Alabama), guess what? They’re going to continue to do that.

These are the same schools that recruiting ranking services have predetermined biases in favor of. It all folds in nicely to Justin Brownlee’s Juggernaut Theory.

And the more I think about it, the less I’m convinced an Oklahoma State or an Arkansas or an Arizona can break into this, especially in the short term. Gundy knows this of course, and it has to drive him bonkers. He has even said he knows he won’t be able to take OSU to the level where it is a top 10 team annually.

“I won’t be able to finish it,” said Gundy. “I’m not going to coach long enough to finish the tradition it takes to be a year-in, year-out top 10 team. I feel like we’re a year-in, year-out top 20 team now. I’m comfortable with that.”

This is both accurate and frustrating. And it all goes back to recruiting, whether we like and agree with that or not.