Big Ten Recruiting Rankings 12-2-12

While I'm still worried that the new schools will only add bottom feeders to the conference, the strength of Rutgers and Maryland in these rankings is really reassuring! Hopefully it'll translate into on the field success. 

Thanks for the great work Ace, but can you really say with a straight face that Illinois has a better class than ohio?  Perhaps this will inspire you to devise a rating system that makes more sense than just multiplying recruits times rating averages.  How about something like average stars for a fixed number of recruits like the final Rivals ratings but with a touch more creativity.  Maybe Nate Silver has some ideas...

Having Illinois ahead of OSU speaks to the absurdity of this ranking metric.  OSU's recruits are, on average, rated almost a full star ahead of Illinois' recruits.  It's hard to take rankings seriously when you can get that kind of result.

I still like these posts, since they aggregate a lot of information nicely.  The rankings don't even come close to passing a sanity check, though.

(And yes, I read your comment about it.)

I don't have a problem with the way Ace presents it, here's an alternate ignoring current class size to get a sense of where Rutgers/Maryland stack up:

that you remove Notre Dame from this list. They are so dead to us. Signed, the Guys and whatever Gals.. 

Since the method is transparent, and all the numbers are there to see, I have no problem with the rankings. It's not hard to re-rank them any way you see fit.

simply because MSU is now 11th among the "B1G" group.

NATIONAL recruiting!  Coach 'em up Corch Dantonio!!

(I know it is childish, but writing the above made my Sunday just a little bit better.)

What is OSU's likely class-size number for '13? 

Sparty drops due to new conference members...hilarity.

The fact that Rutgers has a better class than all but 3 teams in this conference, even going by Ace's metric, speaks to both the weakness of the conference and the relative value of the two teams joining. 

That said, I'm not down with Illinois being that high.  Yes they have more recruits, but nobody would trade OSU's class for Illinois's, and the score differential is just a shadow caused by multiplication, not a qualitative measurement of the two classes.

Recruiting in general seems to be a completely different animal than it was 20 years ago.  I can't say for sure since I'm 33 years old and didn't know much about college football and recruiting before the mid 90's, but I can't imagine what it was like before the internet, popular recruiting rankings, fan sites, social media, etc.  I have to assume that recruiting today and all the technology has given more power to the schools that have more resources.  It has just created a larger gap from the haves and the havenots.  If you look at the history of the B1G only a small percentage of them have had success in the modern era.  It makes me wonder if the Indiana's, Minnesota's, Purdue's, & Northwestern's can ever really compete long term.  I know some make runs for a 5-10 years, but can they sustain success?  I don't know maybe no one can unless you live in a talent rich state like Ohio, FLA, TX, or CA.  I mean the mid-west is already limited in the amount of talent when compared to the east, south, and west.  And, there's only so much talent to go around.  So if UM, OSU, ND, MSU, Neb, and PSU take much of it, what's left for the bottom half of the conference?  They either have to do a lot to develop talent and/or do really well with marketing, filling their stadium, branding their name, etc, and pay for top notch coaches.  I just don't see the lower half of the B1G ever doing all those things that they would likely have to in order to compete long term.  I really think the conference is simply at a disadvantage.  I'm not sure what it was like this pre-internet age (although scholarship changes have also changed things), but I don't see it changing anytime soon and Minnesota returning to a football powerhouse. 

How many more scolly's does Ohio have to give out this class? I like how they currently only have two OL commits

Big Ten recruiting does not look good at this time. It looks like Nebraska would not even finish in the top 25. Only Michigan and OSU are recruiting at a level that allows national relevance.

I hope this is just a down year or this conference could be ugly for a while.

How the hell did PSU flip a kid? Oh, it was from Purdue you say, kid probably figured he wouldn't be going to a bowl game there for 4 years either.

So it's the Big Two and LIttle Twelve again. At this point, as long as M goes to either the Rose Bowl or makes the Football Four every year ... doesn't a slightly weaker B1G help us do that? Every year if Michigan and Ohio are dominant, one will go to the semifinals and one will go to the Rose Bowl as B1G runner up. Why would we want an equally strong Wisconsin or Nebraska to muck that up? 

Just thinking stream of consciousness here. We seem to be through the looking glass now. Up is down. Wrong is right. Northern Illinois is in the Orange Bowl. 

I think the next month of recruiting has 2 major implications if we do/don't snag Green/Treadwell/McQuay:

1. We have the key cogs to legitimately push for top 5 status in the next few years. Shore up weak roster spots AND add playmakers.

2. Prove UM has returned to elite recruiting status. Being 6-10 in national rankings is OK but problematic if OSU and ND get all the publicity as the hot choice for recruits.

A+ is within reach.

and the little 8 9 10 12 for the foreseeable future. As was pointed out above, nobody else in conference is pulling any classes that say "Nationally Relevant in 3-4 Year"

Is it too soon to include Georgia Tech in the rankings? Since Maryland and Rutgers are already included, it would be nice to see how Georgia Tech compares as well.

As hell to see Rutgers and Maryland ahead of MSU, I thought they were recruiting nationally? Granted, they seem to develop players well....but wow, the recruiting numbers outside of us and Ohio become more alarming every week. On a side note.....we need a HELLO post soon, going through withdrawals!

Thanks for all for the work you put into these Ace.  I hope you'll continue to put ND in these rankings in the future.  I think it's important to see where our neighbor is pulling recruits from, regardless of conference affiliation. 

Michigan State is ranked below Maryland and Rutgers?  LOLSparty.

I might do a diary if people are interested. I can summarize most of what I did pretty easily though: I smoked a lot of cigarettes and made a lot of phone calls and pretty much had no life. 

Did I do a newsletter? No, I worked for a magazine that published every other month. We were primarily an east coast publication, but we tried to branch out a little into the midwest. Our big money was in a 900 # that cost $5.00 per call and $1.00 after the first five minutes. They wouldn't let me voice it because I talked too fast (even though I'm southern and have a bit of an accent). 

Yes, we had a big signing day wrap-up. We did breakdowns on each class, top-20 classes, feature pieces (culled from the interviews) on the marquee players, and previews for the next year. We did this for basketball as well.

How was it covered in the papers? It depends. I mentioned a free safety switching schools...I broke that story and it got picked up and run by the big papers in the state at the top of the sports section. I was listed as "contributed to this story." That was a big deal because I was a freshman in college and it was my first big break.

I bought the paper before breakfast and went sprinting out of the dining hall to my academic advisor's office to show him. I had called my mom and dad the night before and told them to be on the lookout and they called my dorm and left a message for me offering their congratulations. That was fun.

Never talked to the Wolverine, but I did share information with those types of publications. If we ran into one another, we'd share notes. This caused a problem a couple of times. There is a guy who works for ESPN now who came onto the scene as I was leaving. He'd always want to know about this guy or that guy...but he never had information to share. I finally told him that he had to start doing his own homework. 

Also...I was a reporter. I worked a beat and made the calls and physically travelled to cover this stuff. I went up and did a ton of work interviewing people once. I came back and filed. I had a bunch of stuff left over, so I transcribed my notes and gave them to a friend who ran a BBS (for you old schoolers). For you kids today, before there were Web browsers, if you got on the Internet, you had to dial into a server and then either telnet to a site (usually military or educational) or you had to call a site directly (a bulletin board service). I gave my transcriptions to my friend who ran the site and a national reporter pulled them and ran them as his own. When I confronted the reporter about this at the halftime of a basketball game, he refused to apologize, claimed that they were out there for anyone to use, and then got my credentials pulled. 

Recruiting info was always a niche thing. My father used to get Street & Smith's and bring them home. He was also a subscriber to a quarterly publication that offered some basketball recruiting information. I was always fascinated with drafts. I was a latchkey kid and faked being sick to stay home alone to watch the NFL draft. ESPN finally put it on television and it happened during the day in the middle of the week. My parents never figured out what I was skipping school for so they just looked the other way. I was a Dolphins fan (living in NC, they were on TV a lot) and invariably HATED who we drafted. "Dan Marino?? We have David Woodley! Why do we need Dan Marino?" I also really got into following minor league baseball. I loved the Red Sox and the Braves and could tell you who all the top prospects in the organization were. Recruiting was a pretty natural thing for me to get into. 

You mentioned Tom Lemming...we never crossed paths. But a guy who has been doing it even longer who was a *tremendous* help to me as a youngster....Bill Buchalter for the Orlando Sentinel. He knows everyone and everything in Florida. And he was always willing to help me out if I needed a rescue. 

You'd call a number and the recording would say, "Hello. You've reached Southern Prep Stars. This is the SEC recruiting update for Dec. 3. It was a big weekend for the Georgia Bulldogs who hosted a number of high profile visitors this weekend. Topping the list is Warner Robbins All American linebacker L'Carpetron McDoogernought. He called the visit an epic event and said, 'Bring on the bitches! Can't wait to be a Dawg' (see what I did there?)"

We tried to put verbals up at the top of the list so people felt like they were getting their money's worth. 

The average update would be 10-15 minutes long. We started doing that in 1991 and it ran until we were bought out in 1997 (I had left by then) and it was easily the most profitable serve we had.

The best part about it...I was working part time for two papers AND the recruiting magazine. They all paid on different schedules. So I got paychecks almost every week. I made around $600 a month. That might not sound like a lot now, but that was twenty years ago, it was while I was a full-time student in college and minimuim wage was still about $3.35 an hour. My parents were paying my tuition. I lived off-campus in a four-bedroom house that I rented with three other guys. My share of the rent and monthly bills was about $200 a month. I pretty much always had money in my pocket. Gas was about $1 a gallon. My car got about 25 mpg. I was getting paid to watch football, talk to players about something I was interested in, take photographs, and write. 

What more could a person want? Besides...sex, glory, fame, and a reasonable grade-point average?