Current 2012 Class Rankings 1.0

Submitted by Hill.FootballR… on

I will start this by saying I apologize for any formatting issues, as this is my first diary on Mgoblog.

There have been many posts on this site predicting where Michigan's 2012 class will be ranked come February. After seeing Tom's post last week, I decided to try and estimate where our class would end up based more upon where teams currently stand, instead of previous years.
 
I also decided that since Rivals has a different number of 5 stars each year this would help to stop people from guessing which players will gain an extra star and which ones won't [Ed-M: Not really a problem though, since Rivals has a ranking and we know how many more 5th stars they typically give]. This way everyone is on this year's current star ratings and you can expect that most teams will have players gain or lose the same amount of stars come February.
 
I went through which teams seem to have the best recruiting classes to date and I ended up with 12 teams. Of course there are some teams with a very small number of recruits to date so later on I may need to add a few teams to the list.
 
I decided that since this early in the process teams have very different numbers of recruits to also add a percentage of 4 or 5 star players. I then used this as well as the total number of players committed already to come up with an estimate of where I think each class will end up. Although there is no way to go through and decide which players each of these teams will add, I think this will give us a chance to compare each class versus our own, and estimate about how we should fare in comparison with each other team. 
 
I will list where I believe each team will end up after this table. I would like to add, like Tom did, that this is almost impossible to predict since there are no constants in the recruiting world and there is no way to know exactly what these teams final recruiting classes will look like. I also chose not to take my opinion into account by saying, "well Alabama is still in on more kids than other teams on this list so they will most likely end higher than this list shows." For this reason, if people seem to enjoy this perspective on the recruiting classes, I will update this Diary as the year goes on with versions 2.0, etc.
 
Rivals:
 Team  Total Commits  5 Stars  4 Stars  3 Stars 2 Stars Not Ranked Percentage of 4-5 Stars
Michigan 19 0 10 9 0 0 52.63
Alabama 14 0 5 8 0 1 35.71
 Auburn 11 0 9 2 0 0 81.81
Clemson 13 0 5 8 0 0 38.46
Florida 14 0 9 4 1 0 64.28
Florida St. 14 2 7 4 1 0 64.28
Georgia 11 1 3 4 0 3 36.36
LSU 15 0 7 7 0 1 46.66
Notre Dame 12 0 4 7 1 0 33.33
Texas 18 1 12 4 1 0 72.22
Texas A&M 20 0 6 12 0 2 30
USC 9 0 7 1 0 1 77.77
 
It should be noted that many of the 2 star or unranked players are kickers or punters. This is why I believe an average star ranking is less informative than a percentage of 4/5 star players. 
 
Looking at this list, I created a simple way to estimate where each teams class could end up if they recruited about 2/3 as well as they have so far and every team ended up with about 25 recruits.  We all know this will not be the case and especially for a team like USC but their recruiting class to date deserves to be on this list. I also I also gave a small advantage to teams that have a 5 star versus a 4 star such as Florida State over Florida. The reason I chose 2/3 efficiency because looking at the percentages, I still feel that Texas, with 18 commitments and 72.22%, has a better chance of ending with a class superior to Auburns at 81.81% but 7 less commitments. 
 
Here is my list estimating the final recruiting rankings: 
1) Texas
2) Auburn
3) Florida State
4) Florida
5) Michigan
6) LSU
7) USC **
8) Alabama
9) Clemson
10) Texas A&M
11) Georgia
12) Notre Dame
 
** USC will not end this high due to NCAA sanctions but I felt as though i would not include that in making my list since it is only July, and other teams may not have room for a class of 25, and therefore not finish as high either.
 
I have always preferred Rivals as a recruiting site, mainly because my friend works for them. But due to the fact that they no longer have a Midwest scout I know many of you prefer Scout. For this reason I also made a table with the Scout rankings. 
 
Scout:
 Team  Total Commits  5 Stars  4 Stars  3 Stars 2 Stars Not Ranked %age of 4-5 Stars
Michigan 19 1 10 8 0 0 57.8
Alabama 14 2 5 6 0 1 50
 Auburn 11 1 9 1 0 0 90.9
Clemson 13 0 7 5 0 1 53.8
Florida 14 2 7 4 0 1 64.28
Florida St. 14 2 8 1 1 2 71.43
Georgia 11 1 2 6 0 2 27.27
LSU 15 0 5 7 2 1 33.33
Notre Dame 12 2 4 4 0 2 50
Texas 18 4 10 3 0 1 77.7
Texas A&M 20 2 5 13 0 0 35
USC 9 1 5 2 1 0 66.6
 
I found it very interesting that although many of you think scout is much kinder to our recruits, most teams actually had a higher percentile increase than we do. At approximately +5.2%, we are in the middle of the pack in increased percentile. Only Georgia, LSU and USC have a lower percentage of 4/5 stars on Scout. I also found it very interesting that Texas has four, yes four, 5 stars on Scout and the total number of committed 5 stars increased from 4 on Rivals to 18 on Scout. This made me excited that Kyle Kalis is the highest rated 4 star on Rivals.
 
No matter what our recruiting class is excellent and no recruiting rankings will change that. I will actually be a little more optimistic than Tom and estimate a final class ranking between 3rd and 9th. 
 
I hope everyone enjoyed this Diary and give me some feedback for things you would like me to change in my updated version!

Comments

Hill.FootballR…

July 17th, 2011 at 8:33 PM ^

Yeah I am working on it. I used a table converter that umhero recommended but its not working!

Edit: I now just used excel and it is fixed! Let me know if I messed anything else up, thanks.

turd ferguson

July 18th, 2011 at 7:26 AM ^

This is interesting and well done. Thanks for posting. I like the comparison of this year's classes to this year's classes and the recognition that kicker/punter ratings often mess up the averages.
<br>
<br>Another way to quantify average quality would be to remove kickers and punters (and maybe FBs?) and then calculate averages. I'm not sure if that's better, but it would feel pretty clean and objective.

jbibiza

July 18th, 2011 at 8:46 AM ^

The 4*+5* percentage is an excellent metric that I have not seen before and perhaps should be the defining criterion for class ratings.  I have never understood why class size has any bearing on determining how good a class is.  It only reflects how many open spots a given school has for that year, not the quality of those recruits.  How can a class of 30 3*s be better than a class of 20 4*s?  Sounds insane and yet that  30 3* class would come out ahead based on the current methods of class rankings.  A rating system that is more accurate would be based solely on the 4*+5* percentage (with a boost for 5*s) with a minimum of 15 total recruits to keep out an unusually small class.  This is obviously not applicable to lower ranked schools that do not attract 4* recruits.

Joust1978

July 18th, 2011 at 11:49 AM ^

I would say if we don't lose any commits, and gain the last 1 or two big commits I don't see us any lower than top three. Of course Feb is still far off......