On Oklahoma State’s 247 Development List and What It Means for the NFL Draft

The NFL Draft starts on Thursday, and Oklahoma State has a few players who will be taken by one of 32 teams over the course of three days. It’s an exciting team for those teams and those players and a time of bragging rights for the schools they’re leaving behind.

We’ve talked a lot on here about getting dudes. Players who are good enough to play professional football or basketball. Those are the guys that make up championship squads. It’s not all that difficult to figure out, but generally the more professionals you have playing a college sport, the better you’re going to be.

Recently 247 went back and evaluated their top 247 players (this number dovetails nicely with the number of players taken in a given NFL Draft) in the 2010-2014 classes to see which schools were the best at attracting top talent and (maybe more importantly) developing that top talent into professionals. Here’s a synopsis.

247Sports examined the first five years of Top247 data in order to determine how top programs nationally have developed four and five-star players. Those classes, 2010-14, span a full spectrum of eligibility across a five-year period. There are some holdouts from the 2014 class (fifth-year seniors). For the most part, however, the 1,235 prospects have exhausted their eligibility or filtered out of college football. [247]

Of those 1,235 players only four were Oklahoma State Cowboys (we’ll get to that in a second). But first, here’s the rest of the explanation from 247 of what they did and why they did it.

To fairly access a successful development, 247Sports created a “Development Rating.” It’s a measure that takes into account the total number of Top247 prospects a program had along with where/if those players were drafted (3 points for 1st rounders, 2 points for 2nd-3rd, 1 for 4th-7th), dividing the total number of prospects by the point total to create the rating. [247]

Alabama had 60 recruits in the top 247 annually in this period of time and notched 64 points for having 10 first round picks, 12 second and third round picks and a handful of others. You divide 64 by 60 and get a development rating of 1.06, which places them second nationally. Here are your top five in development ratings.

• Florida: 1.08
• Alabama: 1.07
• Clemson: 1.06
• Ohio State: 1.05
• Miami: 0.91

Maybe Florida and The U are mildly surprising, but Nos. 2-4 are not at all. I got curious about what Oklahoma State’s development rating is even though they don’t have the minimum 10 recruits in the top 247 nationally from 2010-2014 to qualify for this list.

The total I found for the Pokes over this period of time is four (these were found using the 247-only rankings, not the composite — this is the same method from the article). Justin Gilbert, James Washington, J.W. Walsh and Shaun Lewis were all top-247 recruits nationally and all part of the 2010-2014 recruiting classes.

• Shaun Lewis — 116 nationally — Class of 2010 — Undrafted
• Justin Gilbert — 144 — Class of 2010 — Round 1
• J.W. Walsh — 140 — Class of 2011 — Undrafted
• James Washington — 245 — Class of 2014 — Round 2

So OSU’s score is five points (one first rounder, one second rounder) with four guys which means their rating is actually 1.25, which would be the highest of any team (if they had the requisite 10 top-247 guys to qualify). As an aside, Texas came in last in development rating of the 29 teams who qualified.

While all of this is quite interesting (at least to me), I think it speaks less to OSU’s ability to develop — I’d like to see the study on players who were outside the top 500 but went on to get drafted from these classes — and more to OSU’s lack of ability to recruit top-247 talent.

Here are 247’s national recruiting rankings of OSU’s eight draft picks from the classes of 2010-2014 that were outside the top 247.

• Joe Randle — 330 (composite) — Round 5 (for some reason 247 did not rank Furman or Randle, although their composite rankings both had them in the top 500)
• Josh Furman — 255 (composite) — Round 7
• Emmanuel Ogbah — 694 — Round 2
• Chris Carson — 1,172 — Round 7
• Vincent Taylor — 298 — Round 6
• Marcell Ateman — 479 — Round 7
• Tre Flowers — 1,166– Round 5
• Mason Rudolph — 331 — Round 3

So in those classes, OSU has three guys outside the top 600 that got drafted, one of which went in the first round. That’s pretty good, and I’m curious about how it stacks up nationally (I don’t have the proper data to do this study, unfortunately).

One name we haven’t talked about yet is Tyron Johnson, who would technically qualify for next year’s list (class of 2015) if he gets drafted this year because he was part of the top 247 in that year’s class. That would keep OSU’s development number pretty high.

I don’t know that there are any huge takeaways here, I mostly wanted to satiate my own curiosity. It’s not a surprise that OSU doesn’t recruit well. It’s not a surprise that they develop the little talent they do get. When you’re producing first and second rounders out of top-247 guys at a 50 percent clip, the only reasonable lesson is that you should be trying to snag as many top-247 guys as humanly possible in the months and years to come.