Rutgers Recruiting: Where we stand at T minus 2 days

Commits, decommits, PWOs, fans tweeting recruits and their parents.

WHEN WILL IT END?

Wednesday. Take a deep breath, it’s almost over.

Okay, I lied. Two weeks ago I said I wasn’t going to do this again, but you people seem to love this stuff. So....just for you, we do this one more time. Maybe twice.

National Scene

For starters, this is a very, very fluid situation. When I started this post on Saturday, it looked very much like this class would end up in the high 40s unless there was a significant change and some higher rated kids signed. Or it could simply become Sunday, and everything I wrote on Saturday was wrong. In some cases there were precipitous drops, as seen in the Scout and 247 Sports rankings. Or not. On Saturday, Rutgers’ rank in 247 Sports’ ranking was 45. On Sunday, RU was 38 by the same ranking. The interesting thing to note is how different the rating services are. Rutgers dropped in all three; Northwestern, which passed RU in the average ranking, actually dropped in two of the services and is behind RU in the Rivals rank. Maryland jumped past Penn State in the average rankings but was behind PSU in two of three. Penn State dropped in all three, by either one, two or four places.

Even with the drop in its ranking, Rutgers still finds itself ahead of any number of other P5 schools that have a far more lengthy history at this level of play.

Since he’s this year’s hot commodity, PJ Fleck added ten recruits (including three who immediately flipped from Western Michigan after his hiring by the Gophers), but dropped in two of three services.

Schiano vs Flood vs Ash

Over the course of the recruiting season, any number of people had written or commented how a) bad Kyle Flood was and how he hurt RU football and/or b) how good Greg Schiano had done in building the program. Now, I often use the phrase “figures never lie and liars never figure”, so anything here can be twisted/interpreted/analyzed in almost any way you want to serve your purposes. But just for laughs - not that recruiting is ever a laughing matter - let’s look at a couple of classes for both Flood and Schiano. And let’s not look at them right out of the gate; let’s give them a couple of years to establish themselves. So here are the third and fourth recruiting classes for both of the last two Scarlet mentors.

Flood was consistently mediocre (and for our purposes, I included 2012 as his first year even though it was heavily recruited by Schiano). In his third and fourth season - which were also his last two - he never ranked better than 52. Schiano, surprisingly, doesn’t look as good as a lot of people tend to feel he was. In those two classes, his best ranking was a 36 by 247 Sports in 2003, and his average for those two classes was around 52, pretty much on par with Flood.

The Big Ten

Within the Big Ten, RU was losing its stature, going from a pretty solid middle of the pack to a ninth or tenth best finish....on Saturday. By Sunday when we looked again, RU was back in the middle again. As we said, it’s very fluid. And by the time you read this, this could all have changed again.

The conference as a whole:

Pity Matt Rhule? Maybe....

The 2016 recruiting class saw Baylor finish at No. 41 in the 247 Sports rankings. This is a team that had gone to seven straight bowl games since 2010, winning four, and which won the Big XII in 2013 and 2014. The recent scandals, and the new law suit revelations, haven’t necessarily hurt new coach Matt Rhule’s recruiting efforts as the Bears are still at No. 41 at this moment in the 247 Sports ranking.