Why You Should Care About Recruiting

Note:  I began writing this post prior to Pistolsguy’s post yesterday.  Also, when I say you should care about recruiting, I mean from a standpoint that it correlates to on-field production.  If you get emotionally involved in a high school kid’s college decision, I think you need help.

Another Note:  Congrats to Laquon Treadwell on making his college decision.  Of course I was hoping he’d be a Cowboy, but it’s a win any time a guy signs his name on that line to accept a college scholarship offer. 

I understand as much as anyone that the number of stars next to a guy’s name isn’t a true representation of his future career.  You don’t need to throw Justin Blackmon at me accompanied with the fact Rivals had him ranked as the 91^st best wide receiver (okay…wow) in the 2008 recruiting class. They missed on him. Almost everyone missed on him.

If that’s your case for recruiting rankings being a complete farce, I’ll point out that Julio Jones and AJ Green ranked first and second in that wide receiver class respectively.

You cannot hand select one guy, or even a group of them, to make your argument.  We can go back and forth about guys who panned out (Markelle, Randle, Dez) and guys who didn’t (Reid, Cole, XLK), but neither address recruiting from a team standpoint.

Ten teams have played in the past ten BCS National Championship games:  Alabama, LSU, Auburn, OU, Texas, Southern Cal, Notre Dame, Oregon, Florida and Ohio State.

 

Using the Rivals Team Recruiting Rankings, I went back to 2002 (because that’s as far back as they go) and came up with each of those teams’ average finish in those standings.

Team	Avg Rivals Ranking	Title Game Appearances	Championships
USC	4.18	2	1
Florida	7.36	2	2
Texas	8.27	2	1
LSU	8.55	3	2
OU	9.00	3	0
Auburn	13.09	1	1
Ohio State	13.55	2	0
Alabama	13.73	3	3
Notre Dame	22.73	1	0
Oregon	24.45	1	0

Those averages mean nothing by themselves, so let’s compare them with four other schools, including Oklahoma State.

Team	Avg Rivals Rankings
Georgia	8.45
Clemson	26.82
Oklahoma State	31.73
Michigan State	36.27

Georgia isn’t part of that first group, but you can’t tell me they’re not a Top 10 program. Before looking at these numbers, I would have told you Georgia is far and beyond the best program of the four, and the other three have been on a similar level as far as success.  The history of their recruiting classes tell the same story.

Sure we get that occasional Justin Blackmon or Kendall Hunter, but programs whose success relies more on bringing in the best available talent rather than finding hidden gems have outperformed the second tier programs, such as OSU.  If recruiting correlates to winning, then why should we not care about it?

Please tread carefully though because there’s a line between caring and obsessing.

*I used Rivals.com for all recruiting information in this post