Comparing Big Ten Football Recruiting Rankings

Yes, the 2017 Rutgers Football recruiting class is in the books and I am excited about this class as Chris Ash brought in speed and athleticism at the skill positions, and added much needed depth on both lines. Additionally, Ash landed his top quarterback prospect Johnathan Lewis who has a similar game as Cardale Jones, and brought in depth at the linebacker position.

Rutgers 2017 recruiting class finished 45th nationally by Scout, 42nd per 247Sports, and 43rd per rivals, for a composite average of 43.3 finishing 10th in the Big-Ten.

Most of us are familiar with the star ratings that drive the class rankings, but here is a brief explanation from 247Sports in case you are not familiar:

“Each recruit we evaluate is assigned a numerical rating as well as a star rating. Ratings are determined by our recruiting analysts after countless hours of personal observations, film evaluation, and input from our network of scouts.

Players are first grouped qualitatively with a star rating, then given a numerical rating based on their future potential, and finally ranked according to these numerical ratings”.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the star ratings or the methodology, however, star ratings don’t always pan out as one would expect. Just take a look at this year’s Super Bowl starters and how they ranked as recruits:

“Sixty-one percent of the projected Super Bowl LI starters were not ranked in the top 500 overall in their recruiting class, according to 247Sports Composite rankings. This statistic counts only starters whose past recruiting rankings could be found, though that's most of them.”

Of course you have former elite recruits Julio Jones, Malcolm Brown, and Jake Matthews, however, the majority of the starters were not standouts per star ratings:

“Still, the Falcons and Patriots have far more players who were under the radar. Thirty-seven percent of this year's Super Bowl starters weren't even in the top 1,000 of their recruiting class.”

Let’s take a closer look at Rutgers recruiting class, as well as the Big-Ten. Instead of using star ratings let’s use the number of FBS offers as our basis for ranking this year’s class.

First I ranked the class by the total number of commitments; for the Scarlet Knights this is important as Ash needs to turn this roster over and transform this team into his team as soon as possible. Rutgers finished with third highest number of commits with 26, while Michigan and Maryland led the Big-Ten with 30 and 29 commits respectively. In total the conference registered 330 commitments, with an average of 23.47 commits per team.

Source: 247Sports

Next I ranked the class by number of FBS offers. The 330 commits within the Big-Ten had a total of 3,989 FBS offers, or 284.93 offers per team. The Scarlet Knights had 210 offers which ranked ninth in the Big-Ten.

Source: 247Sports

After ranking the class by Total Number of FBS Offers, I ranked the class by offers per commit. The 26 Rutgers commits had an average of 8.08 offers giving them a conference ranking of 12th. The average offer per commit across the conference was 12.06.

Source: 247Sports

Based on the three metrics above......

The Scarlet Knights finished 9th based on my composite ranking using the three metrics: total commits, total FBS offers, and offers per commit.

Lastly, I took a quick look at commitments and total FBS offers within the Big-Ten Conference by state. Florida had the most commits with 38, while New Jersey ranked 4th with 21 commitments. Commits from Florida also had the greatest number of FBS offers with 621, while commits from New Jersey ranked 7th with a total of 220 FBS offers.

Source: 247Sports