2013 Big Ten recruiting classes: A graphical representation

Submitted by turd ferguson on

[bump: we got guys yo]

This might be one of those things that's cool only to me, but the chart below depicts the current rankings of prospects in the class of 2013.  I used 247's composite rankings, which combine those from 247, Rivals, Scout, and ESPN.  Each colored sliver represents a committed recruit.  The total number of commitments for each program is provided next to the school's name.

I've binned these by 50s, so there's some rounding going on.  Basically, if you look under the "1" on top, you'll see a sliver for every player ranked 1-50 in the national composite rankings.  OSU has four of those, Penn State has two, and we have one (Morris).  The last group ("1001+") represents recruits ranked 1000 or lower or, in almost all cases, unranked recruits.

I had to be creative with the rankings for a few recruits (e.g., JC guys), but I just figured out where their ratings would place them on the regular high school recruit scale.

 

A few of my observations:

 

  • Big two, little ten.  For real.  Those two programs are drawing from an entirely part of the distribution from the rest of the Big Ten programs.

     
  • These group together pretty nicely.  It looks like there are basically three tiers.  The top tier is Michigan and OSU.  The second tier is Nebraska, Wisconsin, Penn State (for now at least), MSU, and Iowa.  Then there's everyone else.

     
  • Someone should make sure that Minnesota's planning to continue its football program.  One key ingredient for a football program: football players.  Minnesota, you might want to get a few of those.

Comments

blueheron

October 10th, 2012 at 6:17 AM ^

Nice work!

It might not be as interesting to the group, but I'd like to see one of these that showed how far away recruits lived from the various schools. I'd expect Michigan to have more of a national reach than the other schools, but you never know. A few years ago Purdue had a big bunch of Florida players in its class. Schools like Minnesota (without nearby talent) always have to go pretty far.

EGD

October 10th, 2012 at 2:08 PM ^

I've seen a lot of different attempts at showing a visual representation of recruiting quality, comparisons, etc., but this may be the most coherent one I've ever looked at.  Nice job, um, turd.

GotBlueOnMyMind

October 10th, 2012 at 2:59 PM ^

Great Post. It would be really cool to see a school like Alabama included in our recruiting analyses (as they are the hopeful destination of our program), if only to see how we stack up against the best.  

Not intending to take anything away, just a thought.

Webber's Pimp

October 10th, 2012 at 3:31 PM ^

Great post. For the most part this is the way its always been in the Big Ten. With this type of talent disparity between schools you would expect us to win most of our conference games.  To put it another way, there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't be winning conference championships (or at a minimum the Leaders Division). I would argue that Michigan always finishes in the top 3. Given that we haven't won a conference championships for almost a decade it makes you wonder: (1) whether the recruiting rankings matter; and (2) whether coaching plays a much larger role in a team's ultimate success. OSU has dominated the the league over the past decade and they too have always finished in the top 3 recruiting wise so there is a case to be made for the importance of securing top talent.  

5th and Long

October 12th, 2012 at 8:58 PM ^

Thanks for the props.  I had the idea early in the day when i first saw the post, but by the time I could work on it and finish it, the post was pushed off of the first page of MGoBoard into thread oblivion.  So not sure it was seen by too many.