College football recruiting ranking provide clues to success.
College sports are ever-evolving, and the recent phenomenon in acquiring talent relies heavily on both courting high school stars and the transfer portal. Simply put, it has changed the way programs build their teams, and it can have an instant impact. Weak teams can reload quickly. Strong teams can be decimated in the same fashion. Patience to wait out maturing incoming classes is no longer mandated. Essentially, this is the nature of the recruiting game nowadays, and coaches have to be able to both sell their programs to experienced players and develop young ones. Being versed in the recruiting game shouldn’t only be considered essential for coaches, however, as those betting should have a good handle on it as well. There is naturally a direct relationship between the success a team has on the recruiting trail to what it has on the field.
The importance of recruiting has never been greater than it is now in college sports, and all of us have been thrown for a loop lately by not only the extraordinary growth of the transfer portal but also by the havoc that COVID-19 wreaked on the sports world. We are finally getting close to clearing out the remaining players competing on that extra year(s) of eligibility they were granted because of the pandemic. These things have made life a little more difficult for bettors who study recruiting rankings as a fundamental part of their offseason handicapping.
It was a few years ago that 247sports, the source I use for my recruiting ranks article every year, added a “transfer” rating to their “recruit” ratings, as well as combined the two ratings into an “overall” rating. Because of the transfer portal’s impact in quickly reshaping rosters, I was forced to implement this overall rating into my annual study.
The recruiting game is quite interesting, and 247Sports covers it as well or better than anyone. This site logs all of the recruits/transfers for every team each season and generates a numerical grading process based on the combined scores of the players a team signs. In 2020, I started looking hard at these numerical recruiting rankings of the FBS programs over the last decade and more. I have found, as usual, that anything numerically rated can be turned into useful foundational betting analysis.
Most fans and bettors typically know who tends to do well annually in the recruiting game, and the usual suspects have once again risen to the top of the rankings for their 2023 classes. Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Ohio State, and LSU comprise the Top 5. These programs’ consistent on-field success can easily be attributed accordingly. Alabama has scored the highest national rating on 247Sports in 10 of the last 13 seasons, with Georgia filling in the gaps in two other years and Texas A&M filling the final void in 2022.
None of what I just shared about the high-ranking teams in recruiting is earth-shattering news, but with all that said, finding other lower-radar teams that might be ready to surprise because of unusually good or bad recent recruiting classes can be crucial to success in betting college football. Similarly, knowing which teams are trending in the right or wrong direction regarding their recruiting success can also benefit the handicapper.
Of course, and this is the third straight year that I will emphasize this, there’s also the matter of taking recruits and making a team out of them, otherwise known as coaching. Knowing which programs make the most or least out of their recruiting classes should also be a fundamental part of your college football knowledge base.
I will address all of those subjects in this article, including projecting this year’s standings for the newly reshaped conferences based SOLELY on the recruiting rankings from 247Sports and a predictive formula that I was able to uncover using regression analysis. This is always an interesting topic that I have now made a permanent fixture in my preparations for each coming college season.
2023 Projected Standings Using the Last Four Years of Recruiting Rankings
After compiling all of the year-by-year recruiting rankings for the FBS teams since 2007, comparing different options to the actual records and my power ratings that teams closed at in a given season, I was able to determine that the most predictive time frame of a team’s success on the field came when considering its Last Four Recruiting Classes. It was greater than one year, two years, three years, and any special combined formulas I derived using the 1-4 year window. This changed since last year, as I used the three-year window as the basis. However, I believe that the extra year of eligibility granted during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the value of age and experience over the last two seasons. As is the case with any statistical study, there are exceptions to the rule. Still, knowing what I know from 20+ years in this industry on both sides of the counter, I am comfortable using this four-year time window to analyze teams’ prospects for a season. That said, I will analyze the results of this again next year to see if the results return to the pre-COVID norms.
Here are the would-be projected standings for the 2023 season for each conference using their combined average rank for their last three recruiting classes (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020). Remember that these projections include no other factor than the perceived talent level of the players when they signed into each team’s recruiting class.
View the College Football Recruiting Rankings Here
As you look at the projected standings, you will see that there aren’t any major surprises projected at the top of any of the Power 5 conference standings. The Group of 5 conference projections have changed dramatically over the course of a year, mostly due to all of the realignment across the country. Some unusual teams, such as SMU and Florida International, are now leaders in their respective leagues for their recruiting efforts. We’ll see how this plays out this fall. It will also be interesting to see how the new additions to the Big 12 shape up. Cincinnati, Houston, UCF, and BYU had grown accustomed to recruiting against the American Conference and Independents. Hopefully, you can find more useful tidbits as you study the Recruiting Rankings chart by conference.
Teams that do the most/least with their recruiting classes
Signing a quality recruiting class is only the start of the story. Coaches need to develop the individual talent they acquire and mold them into a functioning unit in order to be successful. Some programs have demonstrated this ability far better than others. While some programs take a modestly rated recruiting class and make a winning program out of it, there are others that take a highly rated class and underachieve on the field. Let’s look at some of the programs that have distinctly demonstrated the opposite ends of this spectrum.
The teams below are sorted by the difference between their average national recruiting rankings over the last five years and their end-of-year power rating on my scale. As you analyze the merits of why each of these teams appears on the list, be sure to consider which programs have undergone coaching changes in recent years and, as a result, how relevant this info might be for 2023.
Top 20 teams whose on-field performance consistently exceeds its recruiting rating
As you look at the teams on the “overachieving” list, you’ll see a common trend: three of the top four programs are service academies, a credit to the quality character of kids those teams recruit.
Also of note here is that of the top nine teams, for the second straight year, seven of them are the same. New entries are BYU and Tulsa, replacing UCF and Liberty. This is a sign of programs with a consistent method of operation.
All but five of the teams on this list are from Group of 5 conferences. Only Iowa State (#13), UCF (#16), Cincinnati (#17), and Kansas State (#18) represent the Power 5 leagues, and all are from the Big 12. Truthfully, it’s hard to compete consistently for conference titles in the Power 5 leagues if you aren’t recruiting consistently well. It will be interesting to see how much more effective teams like Cincinnati and UCF are in their recruiting efforts going forward with the step up in conference.
