The 2017 recruiting cycle was light on the drama from a national perspective. The same team remained at the top of the mountain and in general there wasn’t a bunch of hype surrounding National Signing Day commits to shuffle the rankings at the last minute.
Here are some of the top story lines from 2017.
Bama Domination
You may have heard this was the 7th straight No. 1 Composite class for Alabama. Just because I was curious they are also on a 10-year run with at least a Top 5 class. This streak has taken place ever since Nick Saban’s first full collection of recruit stepped on campus.
The way Alabama has arrived at the top of the heap is absurd, too. They sneaked past Florida State in 2011 by 2 points to start the streak–and were nearly overtaken by USC in 2015 by 1 point–but have edged out the second-best class by an average of almost 16 points! At one point, Ohio State was in the discussion to challenge the Tide this year and ultimately they passed the Buckeyes by 11 points.
The Squeeze at the Top
If you’re wondering why Notre Dame’s 11th ranked class didn’t really feel quite like it was that high there’s a good reason for that. Not only has Alabama upped their game but so have other blue-bloods. From 2008 to 2016 an average of 2.3 teams per cycle gained at least 290 Composite points–and never more than 3 teams in any single year.
Levi Jones with the T-shirt tease: pic.twitter.com/jSk3ghONZC
— Joey Kaufman (@joeyrkaufman) February 1, 2017
There were 6 teams who scored at least 290 points for the 2017 cycle: Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, USC, Michigan, and Florida State. These teams also gobbled up 21 out of the 32 available 5-stars, as well. Further evidence of the compression of talent into a few programs, we saw 7 out of the remaining 11 5-stars signed by Stanford, UCLA, and Clemson.
No, I want to build relationships over a long period of time. I don’t want to change that from what our classes look like. Since I’ve been here, if you look at the average rankings, we’re anywhere from 5 to 15. We’re going to fall somewhere in that range because there’s a line there we can’t get over based upon what our distinctions are here. That line is going to keep us between 5 and 15.
That quote is from Brian Kelly on National Signing Day and you have to wonder if they’re sensing a small shift in the recruiting game. Kelly’s only Top 5 class from 2013 (which featured a couple 5-stars in Jaylon and Redfield) would’ve finished just 8th overall this past year. Perhaps even more interesting, you could drop Notre Dame’s two lowest rated recruits from 2017, add a pair of the 5-stars Stanford signed, and the Irish would’ve only jumped up to the 9th overall class this year.
Harbaugh Games
Michigan had a small and lightly regarded class in the Harbaugh transition class of 2015 but have since put together the No. 6 and No. 5 ranked classes over the last two cycles. From shady roster management, an abundance of early enrollees, and a do-whatever-it-takes attitude on the recruiting trail, Jim Harbaugh is carving out his own little SEC empire in Ann Arbor.
The Wolverines signed a nation-high 30 recruits in 2017 bringing their two-year total to 58. They have at least 26 players running out of eligibility or headed to the NFL and that number could rise to over 30 depending on who gets invited back for 5th-years. Their last two classes–the bulk of whom will lead the way when Michigan faces Notre Dame to begin 2018–have featured 19 players who were rated in the top 10 at their respective positions.
Oh, Hello
I wouldn’t bet a single dollar that D.J. Durkin moves the needle much in the Big Ten East on the football field but Maryland made a nice move in recruiting this year. They jumped from 42nd last year to an admirable 18th overall this past cycle–and that’s with Notre Dame snagging a couple of their commits very late in the process. The Terps ended up signing just 2 blue-chippers last year and increased that total to 8 in 2017.
I was going to include South Carolina here, as well. However, did you know their last 3 recruiting classes have finished 25th, 19th, and 21st? Did anyone know the Gamecocks recruited this well? Should they be better on the field soon? If not for Muschamp, that is.
Ouch, Dawg
Washington won the Pac-12 for the first time in 16 years, made the playoffs, and notched 12 wins for the first time since their undefeated 1991 campaign. And…they couldn’t come up with a Top 20 recruiting class.
Perhaps worse, the Huskies saw their would-be top and 5th best signees decommit after their season finished. That has to be one tough pill to swallow for Chris Petersen. You’re always welcome in South Bend, Chris.
Funny Farm
Due to limited scholarships (my research has Stanford able to bring back 10 players for a 5th year) the Cardinal took a small class of 14 players but made up for the lack of quantity with quality. Their three 5-stars all came from outside of California which is impressive, plus they also added the nation’s top tight end among 9 overall blue-chips.
Their average rating allowed Stanford to finish 4th overall (just ahead of Clemson who also grabbed just 14 commits, bid of an odd circumstance coming off a championship) and the Cardinal became just the third program over the last 5 cycles to finish in the Top 15 team rankings with fewer than 20 commits.
The other two were also Pac-12 programs: UCLA’s 19 commits in 2015 finished 12th overall and USC’s 12 commits in 2013 finished 13th overall.
Tough Time in Texas
Many expected Tom Herman to hit the recruiting trail hard after being hired in Austin a month before Christmas but it didn’t exactly work out that way. Whether it was Herman’s excuse (not force-feeding relationships in such a short period of time) or a general mismanagement down the stretch the only late pick-up was former Notre Dame commit Jordan Pouncey.
It resulted in the worst recruiting class at Texas in the modern era of recruiting, 26th overall.
You have to figure Herman will bounce back in a big way for 2018 and the good news is that the Big 12 remains so weak in recruiting that Texas still finished 2nd in the conference. Just imagine another recruiting cycle like 2016 except Texas adding a 7th team with at least 290 points in the Composite rankings. It’s pretty amazing that we got to 6 this past year and one of those teams wasn’t the Longhorns.
Eric, in your opinion what are the weaknesses of the overall recruiting rankings? It seems like ND recruits well every year (apparently between 5 and 15), but the football team does not end up ranked between 5 and 15 every season. I have seen Stanford and Clemson thrown out as teams with slightly lower recruiting rankings than ND (some years), but the football teams seem to end up highly ranked each season.
Is it because the recruiting rankings do not consider team needs at all? Or that the recruiting rankings treat all positions equally? Or should they value 5* talent even more? Are ND recruits over-rated? Or, are the recruiting rankings accurate, but it’s just that ND is so difficult academically that ND players do not perform at the level as players at others school? I was just curious about your thoughts.
All of your questions seem to ignore the obvious explanation by absolving the coaching staff of much blame here. This game is still primarily about development. The coaches haven’t consistently extracted the raw talent from their players as well as some other programs. Isn’t the this the most likely explanation or at least the biggest explanatory factor?
And in addition to player development narrowly defined, there have been major schematic problems on defense that we’ve all been howling about for a while. Or at least execution problems, but I think the consensus is that the scheme was so complex that a failure to execute it was blamed on the scheme itself.
I think at least three possible relevant answers:
1) As a first-level principle: ND recruits better than all but a handful of teams. There’s a lot more room to go down than up. So, if we’re recruiting at a top 10ish level consistently (i.e., over a 5 year period), odds are just as a practical matter that we’re not going to out-do our recruiting.
2) Historically, ND recruits have gotten boosts simply by committing to ND. To my recollection, this was the case when I was in school, particularly at the beginning (2005/2006), and from what I understand it only used to be worse. Now I think the bump is negligible as ‘crooting has gotten to be a bigger, and more accurate, business. So I think now this point really isn’t so much of an issue or explanation, but I’m noting it as it was historically a complaint about ND recruits.
3) Our coaching isn’t particularly good. See alstein’s comment.
As I’ve noted here many times in the past, recruiting rankings are an exceedingly inexact science. That’s a big part of it. Every top-level recruit plays against outmatched opponents and puts together great highlight reels, and many of them look really good in camp settings that highlight raw athleticism and further boost their elevated ratings. Get on the field at the next level, and you need another set of traits that some of those elite athletes don’t have. The recruiting services can’t possibly foresee that, of course, so there’s a substantial amount of inaccuracy baked into the process already.
Now, add to that the fact that Jim Harbaugh, David Shaw, Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, and, yes, Brian Kelly all evaluate prospects very differently from how the recruiting services do. They know what holes they have, who they can trust on the roster and who they can’t, what kind of culture they want, what kind of personalities they need, who fits better in their scheme, etc. And while gauging a prospect’s potential is still an inexact science for them, it’s much less inexact than the services. Essentially, each coach is working with a very different, and generally speaking more program-relevant, set of inputs than the services are when they evaluate players. So what Rivals considers an OK to good class, Shaw might consider an excellent class. That’s part of it.
And then, as noted here, this isn’t Risk, where you can put a more impressive army on the board and roll the dice and you’ll win most of the time. You can put a more impressive army on the board, but then you have to move them around the right way and choose the right pieces to emphasize and develop kids the right way. I think that broadly speaking our recruiting rankings have been about right, and the on-field product, both good and bad, has been due largely to coaching, partly to luck, partly to players’ individual efforts, and so on. As we’ve beaten into the ground by now, I think it’s quite fair to specifically detach defensive performance over the last three years from recruiting rankings. VanGorder was a disaster in terms of execution and development – guys were so busy with the Sisyphan task of learning his defense that they never improved, which made it even harder to implement the defense, which made it even harder for them to focus on improvement, etc.
I downvoted this for being unfair to Risk.
Ha, I thought I might be inviting the ire of Risk afficionados. I could never get into that game when I was a kid, had nowhere near enough patience.
Some schools also recruit way more players than us over time. If you recruit 4 more 3 stars in a year, that isn’t going to boost your ranking much, but over 4 years, gives you a much better chance to land difference makers than us. Or in the case of the top recruiting schools, you get 4 more 4 stars every year and it makes a huge difference. I think this is a very underrated factor in why ND can’t consistently compete in the top 5.
I think ND can crack the top 5 by just winning more. As people have said, that is on development. Kelly has never strung 2 ten win seasons together.
Possibly, but to Eric’s point in the article, Weis’s #1 would be just 3rd or 4th in any of the last several cycles – and that class had two five stars and two near five stars in Michael Floyd (#14 overall), Dayne Crist (#19), Kyle Rudolph (#29), and Ethan Johnson (#35). We would have to match our best haul of the last 25 years, basically, to work our way into the top five.
It’s certainly possible. We’re #4 right now in the way-too-early 2018 rankings, and if the new staff continues their momentum and we win 10+ games, I like our chances. But we’re realistically not going to be able to climb above #3 no matter what, I think.
So, do you think Chris Peterson read this Eric? I feel like he and Notre Dame would fit together like peanut butter and jelly. I’m not exactly sure why I think that, but I do.
A million times yes.
Just posted this on the 2017 OL Grades post too, want to make sure everyone sees it…
Hey everyone… Functionality update for you. After much wrestling behind the scenes to get new comment highlighting working correctly, we’re finally throwing in the towel. Unfortunately, there is virtually no demand out there in WordPress land for something like that, believe it or not, and we couldn’t wrangle the one option we had into working consistently. Most recently it wasn’t highlighting anything at all, other times it would leave things highlighted long after you read them… It was a bit of a mess.
On top of that, using that plugin meant we had to turn off the mobile-friendly settings for the site, which made it a lot harder to read and comment on phones and tablets. And comment nesting was more limited, so your witty repartee was occasionally cut off too soon. So if it’s not doing what it’s meant to do, well, not much reason to keep using it.
We went back to our original comment plugin, which other than new comment highlighting works really well. We know the highlighting functionality was important to many, but overall we feel the experience is much better without it than with it in some half-baked fashion. As always, thanks for being a part of the 18S community, and we hope you enjoy the new tweaks.
Uggggh! I paid good money for this site membership, you should be able to do everything I need.
Can’t wait for the launching of 19stripes.com . It’s going to be so much better.
Is this the place to say, “Sark. WOW! I did not see that coming.”?