Oklahoma State Among Teams Doing Less with More on Recruiting Trail

Oklahoma State notched the 33rd-ranked recruiting class in the country on Wednesday, which is probably the number I would make up if somebody asked, “where do you think Oklahoma State will rank in recruiting this year?”

This is not a surprise, but it has been a source of frustration in recent years. Few teams do more with less on the field and few teams do less with more off of it. ? and egg. Mike Gundy has almost everything you could want when it comes to recruiting: an easy program to pitch, world-class facilities, a famous haircut and players who are great salesmen.

But despite classes whose floors seem to be improving, there has been little traction in the national rankings. Gundy’s first two classes in 2005 and 2006 were ranked No. 33 on average, and 114 wins later, his latest class was ranked No. 33.

I thought it would be interesting to see how OSU ranks nationally in class ranking vs. wins ranking. I arbitrarily picked a three-year period to look at the winning percentages of teams nationally and pitted that against their 2018 recruiting class rank. If you change it to two years, it doesn’t change things much for the Pokes. If you change it to four, it flips the narrative slightly because of OSU’s bad 2014 season. If you change it to five years, the narrative is mostly the same as it is below.

Obviously wins aren’t the only factor when it comes to recruiting, but a winning program certainly matters. And the Cowboys checked in as the third-worst team of the bottom 11 in terms of doing less with more on the crootin trail.

Obviously Alabama, Clemson and Oklahoma don’t really fit in here with the Oklahoma States, Wisconsins and Washington States, but these are the only 11 schools with a negative number in 2018. Really, the ones that truly matter here are the top three. Those are the outliers. I could be talked into Iowa and Washington State maybe, but Wisconsin and OSU tell a different variation of the same story: Top 10 program, can’t haul in big classes. Stanford is a little trickier since this year seems to be a temporary blip. They’re usually inside the top 20 in recruiting.

I’ve heard all the tropes, too. Gets good kids. Wants to develop players. Tried the 5-star thing and couldn’t finish the deal. The reality is the reality, people. If you don’t get top 20 classes, you rarely win Big 12 titles and you never win national titles. Period. Full stop. The end.

For better or worse, that’s the purgatory OSU is stuck in as a program. Good enough that it should be getting top 20 classes and winning conference titles. Not quite good enough that it happens. This is the frustration in late November when you think, “shouldn’t I feel like this is a top 10 team?”

Here are the 10 teams that recruited way over their heads in 2018. No surprise at which team is at the top of this list, although I am surprised at which team came in 9th.

Obviously some of these squads are buoyed by new, big personalities. Chip Kelly at UCLA. Scott Frost at Nebraska. (To a lesser extent) Luke Fickell at Cincinnati.

I’m fine with Oklahoma State always having a negative number because I think it means that you’ve maintained an organization where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But its number needs to come down. It needs to be -10 or -8 or -5, not -26. OSU has more or less been a top 15 program since Gundy took over, but it hasn’t caught up when it comes to crootin.

Maybe OSU is the rarest of all programs in that it wouldn’t improve with better classes. Maybe part of the magic potion is scoring 22 3-star guys who really care. But that seems unlikely. The reality is that if Oklahoma State started grabbing top 20 or top 15 classes, it would become marginally better, marginally closer to where Oklahoma is on the field. The endings of those late November games against top 10 teams wouldn’t already be written in stone.

It’s empirical, of course, but we saw that in 2017. Who shined with the chips down late against Oklahoma? Tyron Johnson. He would have been the highest-ranked recruit in Oklahoma State history if he’d come to Stillwater out of high school. Those games are where your pedigreed-players shine. Oklahoma State needs no help going 9-3 and beating the Iowa States and Texas Techs of the world. It does need help, however, in taking the next step, the final plunge into the upper echelon of college football euphoria.