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How to Tell if We're Having a Down Recruiting Class (Analytically)

+21 HS
Hi I'm Will's picture
by Hi I'm Will
July 18, 2022 at 5:28pm
26 Comments

It’s time again for one of my two yearly posts, so buckle up, it’s a long one.  

 

The 2023 recruiting class is off to a hot start. OSU will once again bring in one of the most talented groups of high school football players in the nation. Will it be good enough to win a national title? Will it be good enough to beat Michigan and win the Big(er) Ten? Will it be good enough to maintain the standard created by the program over the last 10 years? All these questions and more will surely be answered in due time. But what if I want to know now? When should I begin worrying about the last week in November of 2026? Recruiting is the lifeblood of any college football program. More broadly, talent acquisition is the lifeblood of any organization that wishes to have some staying power. How can we tell if the future for the Buckeyes is bright? More accurately, exactly how bright? In pursuit of answering these questions, I have devised a way to judge one crop of Buckeye bound high school seniors from another, relying heavily on 247’s composite rankings. In the following paragraphs, I will describe the tool I have created to judge OSU recruiting classes against one another and then provide it for you all to play around with if you’d like.  

Background 

It was starting to look a bit pear shaped. AJ Harris had just broke things off with the Buckeyes, Richard Young was singing Saban’s siren song, Tennessee was handing out happy meals, and the young slobs just didn’t seem to want to visit. Coming off the first truly disappointing year on the field in a long time for the Buckeyes, the trail seemed to be running a bit cold. Ari is right in that there wasn’t an undefended territory for the Buckeyes to raid this year, though now it seems Florida is as open as ever. Since those dark days the Buckeyes have rallied, piecing together an impressive collection of talent with a sky high average player rating. Was it ever in danger? How would we have known? What does a bad class look like? (Since my first draft of this, its began to look a little worse on the defensive side of the ball.) 

Methodology 

Good, bad, disastrous, and transformative are all relative valuations, in so far as they rely on a baseline of sorts to exist. If I were to tell you that the 2023 recruiting class is good, you would likely assume that I’m speaking in relation to past Ohio State classes. The group of kids in a “good” class for Ohio State would be “transformative” for Purdue. If I ever want to speak of Good and Bad class, I better establish a baseline expectation. To do this I’ve recorded information about every high school senior (excluding transfers) who’s scribbled their name on the dotted line in allegiance to the Buckeyes since 2012. This information includes their overall composite rank, their rating, their position, their stars, and which side of the ball they play on. For athletes, I used whichever they actually ended up playing, or whatever the current consensus is for 2023 recruits. From this information, I have charted statistics about each class.  

-Number of Recruits 

-Number of 5 Star Recruits 

-Number of 4 Star Recruits 

-Number of Top 100 Recruits 

-Number of Top 200 Recruits 

-Average Player Rating by Position Group and Side of Ball 

-National and Big Ten Team Ranking 

-Number of Recruits on Either Side of the Ball 

-247Sports’ Overall Class Rating 

I have added color coding that reflets the class’s performance on a specific metric. Green shading means the statistic falls between the 1st and 2nd Standard Deviation above (or better than) the 10 year average. Green Shading with Green Lettering means the statistic falls 2+ Standard Deviations above the average. Red shading means between 1 and 2 Standard Deviations below the average. Red Shading with Red Lettering means the statistic is 2+ Standard Deviations worse than average. Counting Jason Moore, OSU is currently 2.5 top 100 players below its average with just 18 kids in the class. If the class ended today, it would have a fairly average amount of top 200 kids, just below the average there as well. This is all to say that despite the difficulties of recruiting in this new world of NIL, hot new coaches, and mega conferences, OSU shouldn’t be too far off. But I wanted to do more. I wanted to create my own metric for class quality.  

Creating My Own Number 

Now, I have created a formula with 9 inputs that spits out a number based on the quality of the class as well as an individual’s own idea of what makes a class good. The numbers above are a measure of how far a class’s value in a specific statistic is from average, in terms of standard deviation. This number is scaled so each statistic has a standard deviation of 100, and an average of 0. This makes it easier to integrate each statistic into one number. The numbers are summed together and then averaged to create a final class value number. However, I know all of these statistics are not equally valuable in measuring a class’s strength. Therefore, I’ve added an importance multiplier. Now when the values are added up to create the master number, each constituent is multiplied by its’ importance modifier and then divided by the sum of the importance modifiers to get an average. I have it currently set to ignore national and Big Ten rankings, as well as 247’s overall class rating as these are not final and not terribly useful in judging the class of 2023’s power.  

In this chart, items shaded green are between 50 and 100, representing one-half to one standard deviation (100) better than the ten year average (0). Items shaded green with green lettering are 1 to 2 standard deviations above average, and items shaded dark green with bold lettering are 2+ standard deviation better than average. Items shaded red are one half to one standard deviation worse than average. Items shaded red with red lettering are 1 to 2 standard deviations worse than average. Finally, items shaded dark red with bold lettering are 2+ standard deviations worse than average.  

Finally, I’ve created a balance modifier. This adds value to the class score if the class has an even distribution of talent on both sides of the ball while penalizing classes with talent loaded on offense or defense. This metric works on the same scale as the others.  

As it currently stands, the class of 2023 would be slightly worse than average. (Note that the overall class score does not have a fixed standard deviation at 100 unlike the all the input metrics, but does follow the same color coding rules.) However, it would still be better than the class of 15, 16, 19 and 20. Those guys won a lot of games anyway. A few 5 star additions, say a safety from Georgia, and the class quickly falls in line with last year’s class and other classes that rank among the annual contenders.  

I’ve created this tool to be fully modifiable. Every year is represented by a tab and everything is editable. Want to see how the class would look if we add Matayo, Caleb, The Finn, and Novosad? You can copy paste their information into the chart and everything else in the workbook will automatically adjust. You can assume Calvin Simpson Hunt pops into the top 100 and change his overall ranking. This sort of flexibility is available for the class of 2024 as well, though I have not provided a template of known names. I’ve even included a hypothetical class tab, though I’m not sure if its is fully integrated into the rest of the tool without bugs. I’ll provide a link to the tool in the comments, it'll be in some google drive. I’m going to try to restrict edit access so it doesn’t get destroyed, but let you all download it for yourself if you’d like to play with it.  

Other Insights 

Did Stud suck at recruiting? Just how massive is the Hartline Effect? Are we really offensive heavy? Here are some charts that can help answer these questions.  

Next is what I believe to be the most telling, and potentially most dangerous finding. 

 

As seen here, in 18 through 21, our recruiting classes were very offensively skewed, this may have came back to bite us last year. The class of 22 was more defensive, bolstered by the 2 five star Ohio kids, but so far, 23 is back to our offensive ways. 

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy. Please play around with the tool I’ve developed; see how you like it. I'll link the excel file in the comments as well as a word version of this post. It might be read easier in word... Let me know your thoughts.  

Will 

 

 

 

 

This is a forum post from a site member. It does not represent the views of Eleven Warriors unless otherwise noted.

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