Recruiting in the College Football Playoff Era

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I don’t think I’m breaking news to say that recruiting in the College Football Playoff era has now changed with NIL. It’s also not breaking news when I say that Billy Napier had a disappointing Early Signing Day.

5-star offensive tackle Samson Okunlola started it off last week by committing to Miami. That was followed by 5-star cornerback Desmond Ricks and 5-star edge rusher Qua Russaw committing to Alabama. Two 4-star defensive linemen – Jacksonville’s Jordan Hall and Kissimmee’s John Walker – signed with Georgia and UCF. And 4-star edge rusher Isaiah Nixon flipped from Florida to the Knights.

The only chad left hanging is that original Gators target Cormani McClain (ranked second nationally) decided not to sign with Miami as of this writing, though that reportedly was to give Deion Sanders in Colorado a look.

Billy Napier had a rough first season as head coach in Gainesville. His 6-7 record – and especially the mistakes that the team made in its 0-3 finish against Vanderbilt, Florida State and Oregon State – certainly have sowed doubt in the Napier era. This closing salvo to early signing day doesn’t exactly do anything to ease that doubt.

National Signing Day is on February 1, but for all intents and purposes, Early Signing Day is now the day on the calendar that really matters. That’s because out of the top-100 players on the board, there are only 4 players who have yet to sign. There just isn’t any way to make a major move at this point.

I wrote back in August that you pretty much know where classes are going to end up in terms of player quality by the time things kickoff in the fall. At this point, it actually looks like Napier has outperformed where he was in August since he had an average player rating of 91.14 and now stands at 92.34.

But the problem with that is two-fold. One, he has gotten to that rating by bringing in zero players in the top-50 of the rankings. He also only has 20 commits thus far, and since basically the entire top-100 is signed, that ranking is likely to come down if he adds recruits for depth purposes.

Development and in-game management matter. I’ve never said that they don’t. But the baseline of college football is having enough good players that the development and game management mechanisms can be boxes to check for a coach rather than edges to maintain.

Jim McElwain learned that the hard way the minute Will Muschamp’s defensive recruits left Gainesville. Dan Mullen learned it too, right after Kyle Trask was no longer able to lift a sinking defense.

Both of those coaches went a combined 20-7 in their opening seasons, so hopefully that lesson has sunk in to Napier in a way it didn’t sink in with those two initially after the 6-7 start.

Florida isn’t the only team grappling with these sorts of issues. Auburn is on its third coach in three seasons after paying both Gus Malzahn and Bryan Harsin to leave. Miami’s Mario Cristobal is hitting the recruiting trail hard after Mark Richt and Manny Diaz couldn’t make the cut.

And while elite recruiting isn’t the only thing you need to win, I think at this point the data has made it clear it is a prerequisite. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have boosters ponying up for huge NIL deals. You wouldn’t have collectives forming at every school looking to supplement those deals for other players. And you wouldn’t have just about every football analyst chattering about how crazy the transfer portal is going to be this offseason as players who never would have moved previously decide where to play next.

We may not like it (I don’t. I wish schools paid their players out of TV money, which we may be moving towards given the NLRBs involvement with USC football and basketball players), but it’s the reality of the situation that we’re in. NIL has changed everything, and you either are going to adapt to it or you’re going to wallow in mediocrity.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is the level of talent that is necessary to win. We may not know exactly what it will or should cost, but there are benchmarks we can look at that give us an understanding of whether a program is in decline, on the rise, or standing still.

That’s what we’re going to try to do here through the context of mostly the SEC and Florida’s recruiting classes.

The Approach

I’ve been gathering data for this article for about three months now. At this point, I have a database going back to 2014 (the start of the College Football Playoff) through present looking at various rankings in the 247Sports Composite in an attempt to glean what the important factors are when it comes to recruiting and eventually, winning.

First, a couple of caveats.

I realize that elite recruiting often precedes winning, yet all of the numbers I’m going to show here are the winning percentages of teams in the year that they accomplished a certain recruiting ranking. Perhaps I’ll delve into the timing more in the future, but I’m absolutely taking a macro-look at the data rather than trying to incorporate the time lag.

The other thing that I’ve done is completely ignore transfers. That’s going to get more important in the coming years, and likely will become a significant part of the equation. I have my doubts that it is really going to move the needle all that much, in part because of the findings in this study and in part because raiding the transfer portal means you’ve been able to build relationships with/build NIL deals for transfers in a way that’s more effective than your ability to do so with high school recruits. I suspect that the best recruiters of high school players are going to be the best recruiters from the portal as well if they want to be.

Ok, so with that, let’s get into the data.

Who’s winning the playoff?

From 2014-2021, the top-5 recruiting programs in the country based on average player rating are the following:

1. Alabama (93.8)
2. Ohio State (92.7)
3. Georgia (92.3)
4. LSU (91.3)
5. Clemson (91.2)

There have been 36 teams in the playoff including this year’s participants. Of those 36 teams, 22 of them have come from the five programs above. Not only that, but of the 16 teams who have made the championship game (obviously excluding 2022), 15 of those have come from the five programs above. And of the 8 championships won in the playoff era (2014-2021), all 8 have been won from those five programs above.

Each of them has been built slightly differently, but this isn’t just a case of Alabama out-recruiting everyone and we get random teams losing to the Tide. Instead, the unusual case is the Michigan State playoff run in 2015 or the Washinton run in 2016. Even traditional powers like Oklahoma and Notre Dame have been able to break through into the playoff but not into the final because of who is in front of them.

Interestingly, Oregon in 2014 is the only team not in the top-5 to make the final, but that was because they played Florida State, another team not listed in the top-5. We have that again this year as TCU is playing Michigan.

I’d suggest the smart bet is to take either Georgia or Ohio State given what this data suggests. And given Scott Stricklin’s assertion that he wants sustained success over time and Florida’s definition of success (national championships), it’s pretty clear that the Gators need to get into the top-5 of recruiting as soon as they can.

We shouldn’t have lost….our team is more talented than theirs

I heard this refrain in some form or another all during the 2022 season when it came to Florida and Billy Napier: the Gators have way more talent than (insert team here) so they should not be losing. But is that really the case? Well….only at the very top.

The above chart is the 247Sports average player rating plotted against winning percentage for each Power-5 team from 2014-2022 (so far). It shouldn’t be a surprise that Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State and Clemson are all the way to the top right.

But look at what happens when you get below those four. Even LSU – who has a championship in that span and has recruited equivalently to Clemson – is essentially in a large group of teams who are somewhere between 60-75 percent winning percentage even though their recruiting is just slightly below those top-4.

You have teams like Wisconsin, Iowa and Utah who have overachieved and teams like Texas, Auburn and Miami who have underachieved. But what this suggests is that below any sort of elite-level recruiting, there is a lot more variation in results and the chances of being beaten by a team with less talent goes way up.

That realization really hits home when you look at the same data broken down into individual conferences. If we show the same plot as above but eliminate all but the SEC teams, here’s what we get.

It’s almost a completely linear plot at the top and bottom with some variation once you get to Florida, Texas A&M and Auburn. But you can essentially predict who’s been the most successful SEC team over the past 9 seasons just by measuring the total talent on the teams. Do a Kentucky, Ole Miss or Tennessee rise up every once in a while? Absolutely. Recruiting at this level doesn’t prevent you from having a good season or two. But if you think about the teams below Georgia and Alabama, they have one thing in common. Good seasons happen when they have Joe Burrow, Kyle Trask, Hendon Hooker or Matt Corral behind center (which may be good news if Jaden Rashada or D.J. Lagway become a star).

This outcome has a lot to do with the overall recruiting in the conference, as the SEC as a whole has an average player rating of 88.8, which correlates to an average national ranking of 19.8.

Compare that to the Big-12. The average player rating for the teams in that conference is 86.0, which correlates to an average national ranking of 39.4, or almost double the SEC. In fact, eight of the ten teams in the Big-12 have average player ratings lower than the SEC average.

What that means is that we should expect to see much more variance in the results in the Big-12, since the stats we showed above suggested that once you got past the elite programs, winning percentage is much more random. That’s exactly what we see.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the best recruiting team in the conference – Oklahoma – has dominated. The second thing you’ll notice is the second best recruiting team in the conference – Texas – has way underperformed its ranking.

Note though that both Texas and Oklahoma are at an average player rating of just above 90.0. That is not elite-level recruiting, just good. And so we shouldn’t be surprised that a team like Texas has seen variance that Georgia or Alabama have not.

Beyond Oklahoma and Texas, you have a bunch of teams that have recruited in the 30s. TCU is the best recruiting team of the bunch, but their average over the 9-year span examined here is 32nd in average player rating.

This is the argument that Nick Saban should have used when stumping for the playoffs. Yes, the Tide lost two games and TCU only lost one, but Alabama also played six teams in the top-25 most talented (and two more in the top-30) while TCU only played two teams in the top-30.

The same trend applies to the other conferences as well. Ohio State dominates the Big Ten in recruiting, with Michigan and Penn State close to each other but a distant second and third. USC dominates the Pac-12 in recruiting with Oregon and Stanford finishing second and third. And Clemson dominates the ACC with Florida State and Miami finishing second and third.

For most of those other conferences, the second and third teams fall into the same tier as Oklahoma and Texas (i.e. average player rating of 90.0 or below). So you end up with a team like Wisconsin (31st overall in average player rating, 86.7) with a similar record over this time-span as Michigan (12th overall in average player rating, 89.9).

This is also why Florida has been so up-and-down for the last decade even though the Gators have recruited decently (89.5 average player rating, 14th overall). That doesn’t seem all that bad, especially given Michigan making two straight playoff appearances.

But then you realize that Florida’s ranking is sixth in the SEC. Inevitably, the Gators are going to be better some years than others, and potentially even be able to crash the party every once in a while.

But at that level, there is no hope for consistent excellence in the SEC.

Changing of the guard in the SEC?

Of course, all of this analysis has been each program over a 9-year period. Obviously, sometimes things are headed in the right direction and sometimes they are headed in the wrong direction. Want to know why Georgia is dominating and Florida loses games it shouldn’t? Here it is.

In 2013 and 2014, Missouri won the SEC East, which was a significant anomaly. However, I think you can explain it by looking at this chart. Essentially, nobody in the East had separated themselves from a talent standpoint so much that a team that hit lightning in a bottle couldn’t come out on top. Even so, the SEC East has belonged to Florida (3 times) and Georgia (5 times) ever since.

The Bulldogs’ 5 wins have come in the last 6 seasons, and wouldn’t you look at that? It turns out that Georgia’s run of dominance coincides with a significant uptick in the average player rating of the players brought into Athens, with a value well over 93 for the last six years.

During the same period, Florida has been stuck right around 91, which doesn’t sound like all that much until you realize that the difference between 94 and 91 in average player rating is the difference between the 1st and the 13th ranked classes.

Elite classes vs. Elite Prospects

The good news is that Billy Napier is showing an upward trend in his second season in Gainesville. The Gators are above 92, which is exactly where Kirby Smart was from an average player rating standpoint in his 2017 bump class (92.27).

The difference is that Smart’s class was much more top heavy, with Isaiah Wilson (16th nationally), Richard LeCounte (25th), D’Andre Swift (33rd), Jake Fromm (44th), Andrew Thomas (45th) and Deangelo Gibbs (49th) all ranked higher than the Gators highest commit for 2022 (Jaden Rashada, 56th).

Of the top-six players in Smart’s class, the result was the 4th, 29th, 35th, 167th and 169th picks in the NFL Draft. Of the remaining 19 players in the class, only four have made it to the NFL thus far (Mark Webb, 241st; Monty Rice, 92nd; Justin Shaffer 190th; and Eric Stokes, 29th).

This isn’t a reflection on Smart’s coaching or development ability. This is exactly what we see each year, where highly ranked players pan out at a significantly higher rate than lower ranked players, but that the drop-off in probability of making it to the next level falls off precipitously as the rank decreases.

This chart is from the 2013 and 2014 recruiting classes, but the story is the same year-after-year. This year, the 30th ranked player has a 247Sports ranking of 98.53. And given what I’m showing in this chart, it says that player is more than two-times as likely to end up in the NFL than the player ranked 100th (95.32). It also says that a player in the top-5 is three-times more likely.

Just as an example, if we take the second-ranked players in the 247Sports Composite rankings from 2016-2020, here’s what we get:

• 2016 – Dexter Lawrence, Clemson (1st round NFL draft pick, 17th overall)
• 2017 – Najee Harris, Alabama (1st round NFL draft pick, 24th overall)
• 2018 – Justin Fields, Georgia/Ohio State (1st round NFL draft pick, 11th overall)
• 2019 – Kayvon Thibodeaux, Oregon (1st round NFL draft pick, 5th overall)
• 2020 – Bryce Young, Alabama (Heisman Trophy Winner)

If we do the same for the 50th ranked players in the same time-frame, the story is very different.

• 2016 – Patrick Hudson, Texas (Medical Retirement)
• 2017 – Tyjon Lindsey, Nebraska (transfer to Oregon State, 90 career catches)
• 2018 – A.J. Lytton, Florida State (transfer to Penn State, 28 career tackles)
• 2019 – Akeem Dent, Florida State (4 years at FSU, 4th round grade)
• 2020 – Walker Parks, Clemson (Freshman All American in 2020, 26 starts)

Maybe Dent goes back to school and ends up going in the first round. Parks has been a big-time offensive lineman for Clemson, though he had to move from tackle to guard. But even with that, we’re talking about a 40 percent NFL rate for these five versus all five players in the first round for the guys ranked higher.

Previous Class Comparisons to Florida

Billy Napier’s class is actually difficult to evaluate because of this top-heavy effect. There just aren’t that many classes that you can compare to what Napier is doing with this particular Gators class.

His class has an average player rating of over 92. But he also has zero 5-star recruits. The only other class to achieve that since 2014 is the 2021 class signed by Mario Cristobal at Oregon. It’s way too early to determine whether that class is going to succeed at Oregon, but it also says that Napier is trying to do something nearly unprecedented by winning big in this particular way that there aren’t other classes built this way.

If we filter by zero 5-stars and point totals between 270 and 280 (Florida is currently at 272.71), there are only four classes that match that criteria: 2020 Auburn, 2019 Florida, 2017 Oklahoma and 2014 Tennessee.

If we filter by zero 5-stars in the SEC, the top classes by average player ranking are 2020 Auburn, 2018 and 2019 Florida, 2018 Auburn, 2020 Tennessee, 2018 Texas A&M, 2014 Tennessee, 2022 Auburn, 2016 Tennessee, 2017 Florida and 2022 Kentucky.

There just haven’t been a lot of classes that have stacked players ranked between 100-300 like Napier has done here without any elite talent also included in a class. But I do get really skittish with the 2018 and 2019 Florida classes falling on some of these lists, given that Dan Mullen was just let go because of his inability to recruit at a high enough level.

Takeaway

Recently, I’ve taken to dividing classes up into three zones to try to tease out the top-heavy nature of recruiting classes. Zone 1 is players ranked 1-60, Zone 2 is players ranked 61-200 and Zone 3 is players ranked 201-600. From there, I’ve come up with a model to predict how many players from each class will be drafted into the NFL.

What the model says is that Florida has the fourth best class in the SEC, but that the Gators again were outpaced by Alabama, Georgia and LSU. This analysis does suggest that Florida was able to gain ground on South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida State. If you’re building a team that is going to go 9-3 consistently, you have to beat those teams.

But we’ve already established that a team that ranks fourth in recruiting in the SEC is going to win about 60 percent of its games over a long time period. And if we add the classes for soon-to-be-SEC-members Texas and Oklahoma (5.7 and 5.2 predicted players drafted), Florida now drops to sixth in the conference.

I sympathize with Florida fans who want to give Napier time. I want to believe he’s going to turn the program around, and a lot of the things we hear about the structure and organization within the program is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was. The additions of  Rashada in this class and Lagway in the 2024 class are huge signs that better days lie ahead.

But there is no doubt that Florida just fell further behind its conference rivals, including one (Brian Kelly at LSU) in the exact same situation as Napier. Further sowing doubt is that Napier also got beat by other programs in the coaches’ second class as well (Miami, Oklahoma, Notre Dame and Oregon).

Whether we want to blame previous regimes, NIL, the machines that have been built in Athens and Tuscaloosa or a myriad of other things, we’re not really moving all that far forward from where we were previously.

Based on my model, Mullen’s 2018 and 2019 classes should have had 6.7 players drafted. At this time, there have been 4 players drafted (Kyle Pitts, Dameon Pierce, Evan McPherson, Kaiir Elam) and I suspect they’ll end up right around 7 when you factor in some of the guys who’ve transferred (Diabate, Hopper, Copeland, etc.).

My model predicts that out of Billy Napier’s first two classes at Florida, we should expect 6.2 players drafted. Yes, this 2023 class is better than Mullen’s 2019 class, but his 2022 class was below Mullen’s 2018 class.

Admittedly, Mullen took some fliers on players who might not qualify and had a bunch of guys in his classes who didn’t actually make it to campus. But Napier has only signed 39 players in the past two classes thus far. Georgia has signed 55 (h/t JPGator in the Gators Breakdown Discord chat).

So Georgia is beating Florida not just in overall player ranking or point total, but in volume as well. Add to that the Bulldogs bringing in wide receivers RaRa Thomas and Dominic Lovett through the transfer portal (a position of need for Florida) and the gap continues to widen.

This sounds like doom-and-gloom for the Gators and it isn’t that. Napier has two high-level recruits at the most important position on the field. He has filled significant gaps at defensive line and defensive back. This class is unprecedented in its average player ranking and lack of 5-stars, which means the true outcome is difficult to predict.

I think Florida is going to win a ton of games with these players and will be able to re-establish itself significantly above Kentucky, South Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee and even Vanderbilt. And with a 12-team playoff coming, Florida may end up making that playoff relatively soon.

But the significance of the top-5 recruiting teams winning all 8 playoffs and 15 of 16 semifinal games shouldn’t be lost on us either. Football is not basketball, where an inferior team can get hot from 3-point range and beat a vastly superior team. I actually believe based on this analysis and other data that that 12-team playoff is going to help those top recruiting teams win the playoff more often than hurt them (i.e. Alabama would be in this year).

Florida got better on early signing day. These players are all going to be valuable contributors to the Gators for the next three or four years. But there is also one thing that’s clear from this analysis.

If the goal is winning championships, this early signing day was disappointing because it’s just not good enough.

Merry Christmas

If you’ve stuck with me this far, perhaps as Andy tells Red in Shawshank, you’re willing to come a little further.

My favorite book in the Bible is the Book of Nehemiah, in many ways because it is one of the few places where a biblical character accomplishes something great without a miracle. Christmas is just the opposite, in that it requires a belief in a virgin birth and the significance of that birth through the resurrection celebrated at Easter.

Years ago right around this time of year, I just had a constant feeling of unease. I knew I felt a nagging emptiness and lack of purpose and fulfillment, but didn’t really understand why. And when I tried talking to religious folks about this, the idea of miracles was just too much for me to overcome when reading the Gospels.

But not everybody’s path is the same path, and mine was finding Nehemiah through Saturday Night Live.

We were spending the holidays at my mother-in-law’s house and SNL was on as everyone went to bed. I was doing something on my laptop and not paying a whole lot of attention when SNL ended, and some guy named Andy Stanley came on the screen.

Stanley can be a controversial figure in some church circles, but his “sermon” spoke to me, as did my fascination with his marketing strategy of preaching to folks who had just indulged in SNL.

I’m not going to do anything other than suggest that if you’re feeling something similar to the unease I described above this holiday season, that you owe it to yourself to check out this link to that show.

And if you feel like you need more, please reach out. Some things are more important than recruiting.

Thank you for reading this year and Merry Christmas.