Recruiting: Four and Five Stars

In an earlier post, I tried to determine whether or not recruiting rankings mattered in terms of future team performance. One of the many conclusions of that post was that approximately 80 per cent of Alabama's roster (not the total roster, but only those on scholarship)the past few years has been comprised of players rated as three-star or lower by the recruiting services. Long story short, the argument was that number was / is entirely too low.

So, I decided to take the same time period (2002-2004) and determine how many four and five star recruits that each SEC team signed over that period.

The following is what I found, listing the number signed by each team per year, and then the total for the three year period:



So, how well did all of that correlate with overall winning percentage in a future time-frame (2004-2006)? Here is that data broken down:



Much like with recruiting rankings, as you can see, where you rank in terms of how many four and five star recruits you sign, compared to the rest of the conference, strongly correlates with overall winning percentage on down the road.

To be specific, the correlation between recruiting rank and winning percentage rank was a robust .7202. That's not quite as strong as the .8 that we saw between overall team recruiting rankings and winning percentage, but it's still very strong.

At bottom, the teams that sign the most four and five star players are generally the ones that do the best on the playing field. Certainly there were a lot of busts included in those numbers, but on the whole the teams that signed the most high-quality players did better than the rest. It didn't correlate quite as high as overall team rankings, I presume, because recruiting isn't just about signing four and five star players (although that's the majority of it), it's also about signing some players that are rated three stars and below and turning them into quality football players as well.

Nevertheless, at bottom, it just further seems to indicate that, regardless of how vehemently some people want to assert otherwise, recruiting rankings do matter.

Big Recruiting News

Only twenty-four hours after landing a huge prospect in Tyler Love, Nick Saban and company have apparently struck gold again.

Melvin Ray, one of the top wide receiver prospects in the country, has committed to Alabama. Ray is a 6'3, 202 pound receiver out of Tallahassee, Florida. He was one of the most widely sought-after recruits in the nation, with offers from the likes of Alabama, Florida State, Florida, LSU, Georgia, Clemson, and South Carolina. Now don't think this recruiting battle is over just yet. Ray is from Tallahassee, and admittedly he and his father have always been big FSU fans. And while he says he would not have committed now if he thought he would back out later, he also did say that he would take a visit (I assume an official visit in December or January) to Florida State. It's not over yet, but it's just the point of the matter that Saban is going out-of-state and freely reeling in such great prospects.

What can you say? Nick Saban is certainly earning that four million dollar paycheck on the recruiting trails. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this class will, as a worst-case scenario, be a top ten class, and has a great shot at being a top five class.

Many of the issues that we analyze around here can largely be addressed with a massive upgrade in the talent level of the entire roster, and Nick Saban seems to be doing just that.