How the New 247 Recruiting Rankings for 2021 Affect Oklahoma State’s Class

We’ve been engaged in a debate over in our forums about which recruiting rankings are the best recruiting rankings, which is both incredibly mature for a bunch of adults to engage in and pertinent to the newly-released 247 rankings, which came out earlier this week.

The consternation — if you can call it that — is essentially over which 247 rankings to value most. Here are the options.

247 Composite: The 247Sports Composite Rating is a proprietary algorithm that compiles prospect “rankings” and “ratings” listed in the public domain by the major media recruiting services. The 247Sports Composite Rating is the industry’s most comprehensive and unbiased prospect ranking and is also used to generate 247Sports Team Recruiting Rankings. All major media services share an equal percentage in the 247Sports Composite Rating.

247: This is simply 247’s evaluation without all the other entities thrown in. As 247 notes, they have 32 five-star players every year in which they try and mirror the 32 players most likely to be drafted in the first round from each class. Their goal is to try and select the best players before NFL teams select the best players.

We have always used the 247 composite rankings because of the wisdom of crowds theory and the ability to remove singular bias within that ranking because you’re drawing from so many different sources. However, I think I may have been swayed to the 247-only evaluation because, as Adam Lunt has pointed out here, it just seems to be better run than all the rest.

All that to say, here’s how OSU’s five recruits for 2021 were affected by the new 247 rankings (not composite rankings, but 247-only rankings), which came out on Wednesday.

Collin Oliver (Santa Fe LB): Not much changed for Oliver. He dropped a little nationally to No. 228 overall, and slid down one spot in the state of Oklahoma because he was jumped by defensive tackle Aden Kelly (another OSU target). Oliver is still a four-star guy and one of the best defensive prospects of the last decade for Oklahoma State.

Ty Williams (Muskogee S): Big-time movement for Williams, who jumped from outside the top 500 nationally in the rankings to No. 235 overall (just behind Oliver). He is also now considered a 4-star player by 247, which gives OSU a pair of four-star guys on the defensive side (where you can’t have too many stars). That’s massive. He’s also now ranked as the No. 6 player in the state of Oklahoma by 247, which means that if OSU can get Kelly as well, they’ll have three of the top six guys in the state.

Jaden Nixon (Lone Star RB): No real change here. Nixon is ranked as a top-70 player and a top-eight running back in the state of Texas.

Kolbe Fields (Archbishop Rummel LB): Same as Nixon, no change. Fields is a top-25 player in the state of Louisiana, according to 247.

Raymond Gay (Red Oak CB): There was a lot of change here, mostly because Gay had not yet been evaluated by 247. When he committed to Oklahoma State, it looked like he was a zero-star player, but the reality is that he simply hadn’t been graded at all. With his recent commitment to Oklahoma State, he has now been evaluated as a mid-level three-star guy as a defensive back and a top-150 player in Texas. Not life-changing, but a nice guy to have in your class.