http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/recruiting/teamrank/2015/all/allGood news...we are back up to 7. I think we have been as low as 11 or 12. Jones has the recruiting thing down, apparently, and the good thing is that it's good whether he gets us there or if the next coach just has a stable of talent to build on. For the record,I think Butch will make us very competitive though I am not sure he can do the NC, but who knows.
So...to evaluate things like this, I use a blog that Revolver posted about 4-5 years ago that I can no longer find. What I remember is that it was a guy who evaluated recruiting ratings over a four year average for about 10-12 years. That is, in any given year he averaged the recruiting score for the previous four years, and then compared heads-up records between the teams. What I recall is that he found that if a team had a 4-year recruiting record that was about 400 points better than their opponent, it started to make a HUGE difference. Smaller differences matterd, but I think the study showed that the win % was over 80% if the recruiting advantage was 400 points.
Now, I don't recall if that was based on Scout or Rivals (and as an aside, if anyone has a link to the study, I would greatly appreciate it, thanks!), but Scout's scoring is higher than Rivals, so 400 points would mean less.
But...if it was 400 points in Rivals, then that would mean that Tennessee is in line with 2-15, and we don't have to worry about those teams getting a huge advantage on us or vice versa. But since I seem to remember that spread being less, I am thinking that the 400 points was based on Scout and not Rivals and the equivalent would be maybe 200 points since Scout is roughly twice as high as Rivals. So in that case, there would really not be much of an advantage for teams 5-9 compared to Tennessee. That sounds more reasonable and what I seem to recall from the study.
So...just a good way to try and rationalize recruiting ratings and tie them to reality. The Boss thought highly of it IIRC (not Bruce...Revolver
).
One last point though. If the correct number is 200, please compare no 1 to no 2. IT'S A FREAKING ONE THOUSAND POINT ADVANTAGE!!!!!
And this happens every year.
But ... nothing unusual about that. Nothing at all. It's just that Saban's winning personality lures recruits.
This is what I mean when I say their success is shocking. From no. 2 you have to go down all the way to 19 to have a comparable advantage. Yeah, *I* could freaking win an NC at bammmer. OMFG!
I know I beat this horse to death all the time, but when I see the numbers, I just have to say something. This is not like Lance Armstrong winning 5 Tour de France races in a row after having cancer, it's FREAKING WORSE. Wow.