Recruiting Rankings Do Matter… If You Know How To Look At Them

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Next Wednesday, one group of SEC fans will celebrate a signing day “championship.”  That same evening, a larger group of SEC-backers will claim that recruiting rankings aren’t accurate.

Both groups will be right.  Sort of.

In order to get a grip on just how accurate recruiting rankings are when it comes to predicting success in the rough and tumble SEC, we went back through 10 years of signing day grades and rankings.  Then we compared those rankings to the actual on-field results from 2006 through 2011.

We found — as we have before — that recruiting rankings do provide a pretty good ballpark indicator of a program’s future success.  But they are far from infallible.

As usual, we pored over the rankings as put together by Rivals.com.  Some prefer ESPNU’s rankings, others Scout.com and so on.  We like Rivals.  And the data you’ll see will explain why.

The general process was as follows:

1.  Tally up the recruiting rankings for all the signing classes that would normally impact a season.  Let’s use this past 2011 season as an example.  True freshman signed in ’11, sophomores in ’10, juniors in ’09, seniors in ’08, and a few redshirt seniors might’ve still been around from the ’07 class.  We used Rivals.com’s SEC rankings, 1 through 12.

2.  Add up the SEC records for each program in a given year.  The SEC title game didn’t count.  We didn’t knock off Alabama’s numbers due to NCAA penalties.  We wanted to know which teams won the most in-league games only… and we wanted to know who actually won on the field, not who was stripped by the NCAA later.

3.  Finally, we compared the combined recruiting rankings with the SEC records from the season in question.  Pretty simple.

Now, signing classes can be affected — obviously — by coaching changes, attrition, injuries, transfers, flunk outs, drop outs, dismissals and the like.  So the system isn’t perfect.  But it’s close enough to give us an idea of how accurate the recruiting rankings work.

Looking at the recruiting classes from 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, here’s what we found when comparing rankings to actual on-field SEC results in the fall of ’06:

Okay, right off the bat you’ll see that the combined recruiting rankings from ’02 through ’06 don’t provide a perfect team-by-team indicator of success.  Georgia had the five best classes leading up to 2006, yet the Dawgs managed only a 4-4 SEC record.  Arkansas, on the other hand, finished with a 7-1 league mark despite ranking 8th in the SEC for that five-year recruiting window.

Looking at the six seasons from 2006 through 2011, we found that there were always some schools that finished much better or much worse than the recruiting rankings would have suggested.

So recruiting rankings don’t work.  Right?  Not exactly.

For kicks we broke the league into fourths.  The idea was to see if recruiting rankings worked on a general basis.  Boy, did they:

The top three teams in recruiting rankings from ’02-’06 (Georgia, LSU and Florida) combined for a 17-7 SEC record.  That’s a winning percentage of .708

The next three teams in the recruiting rankings (Tennessee, Auburn and South Carolina) combined for a 14-10 SEC record.  That’s a winning percentage of .583.

The next three teams down the list (Alabama, Arkansas, and Ole Miss) notched an 11-13 SEC record.  That’s a winning percentage of .458.

And the three worst teams in Rivals’ ’02 to “06 recruiting rankings (MSU, Kentucky and Vandy) combined for an 8-24 SEC record.  That’s a .250 winning percentage.

In other words, recruiting rankings might not tell you exactly how your team will finish in SEC play, but they will give you a pretty good idea.  And we found that to be the case in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Below are the group results for each of those seasons:

2007 Season (2003-2007 recruiting rankings)
1.  Top Three Schools (Florida, LSU, Georgia): 17-7 in SEC, .708
2.  Next Three Schools (Tennessee, Auburn, S. Carolina): 14-10 in SEC, .583
3.  Next Three Schools (Alabama, Ole Miss, Arkansas): 8-16 in SEC, .333
4.  Bottom Three Schools (MSU, Kentucky, Vanderbilt): 9-15 in SEC, .375

2008 Season (2004-2008 recruiting rankings)
1.  Top Three Schools (Florida, Georgia, LSU): 16-8 in SEC, .666
2.  Next Three Schools (Tennessee, Auburn, Alabama): 13-11 in SEC, .541
3.  Next Three Schools (S. Carolina, Ole Miss, Arkansas): 11-13 in SEC, .458
4.  Bottom Three Schools (MSU, Kentucky, Vanderbilt): 8-16 in SEC, .333

2009 Season (2005-2009 recruiting rankings)
1.  Top Three Schools (Florida, Georgia, LSU): 17-7 in SEC, .708
2.  Next Three Schools (Alabama, Tennessee, Auburn): 15-9 in SEC, .625
3.  Next Three Schools (S. Carolina, Ole Miss, Arkansas): 10-14 in SEC, .416
4.  Bottom Three Schools (MSU, Kentucky, Vanderbilt): 6-18 in SEC, .250

2010 Season (2006-2010 recruiting rankings)
1.  Top Three Schools (Florida, LSU, Alabama): 15-9 in SEC, .625
2.  Next Three Schools (Georgia, Auburn, Tennessee): 14-10 in SEC, .583
3.  Next Three Schools (S. Carolina, Ole Miss, Arkansas): 12-12 in SEC, .500
4.  Bottom Three Schools (MSU, Kentucky, Vanderbilt): 7-17 in SEC, .291

2011 Season (2007-2011 recruiting rankings)
1.  Top Three Schools (Alabama, Florida, LSU): 18-6 in SEC, .750
2.  Next Three Schools (Georgia, Tennessee, Auburn): 12-12 in SEC, .500
3.  Next Three Schools (S. Carolina, Ole Miss, Arkansas): 12-12 in SEC, .500
4.  Bottom Three Schools (MSU, Kentucky, Vanderbilt): 6-18 in SEC, .250

That’s pretty impressive.  Breaking six seasons into fourths, there were 24 “slots” and only two of those slots were a tad off:

* In 2007, the bottom four schools in the recruiting rankings actually outperformed teams 7, 8 and 9 by one game in the SEC standings.

* Last season, teams 7, 8 and 9 finished with the same .500 record in conference play that teams 4, 5 and 6 did.

Other than those two tiny differences, the recruiting rankings provided a good ballpark indicator of teams’ SEC success.

The trick to reading recruiting rankings, therefore, is to use them as a compass.  Over a span of years, you’ll find that the teams getting the highest marks on signing day in the SEC will usually do pretty well.  Those that score poorly, usually really won’t have good results inside the league.

But recruiting rankings cannot be used as a GPS.  They aren’t precise.  They aren’t perfectly accurate.  Almost every year, Arkansas outperforms its recruiting grades.  Meanwhile, a school like Tennessee — that has seen massive attrition thanks to back-to-back coaching changes — has underperformed based on the caliber of its signing classes.

Recruiting rankings do matter.  The more four-stars your schools signs, the better the odds you’ll find a great difference-maker.  It’s a bit like buying raffle tickets.  The more you have, the better your odds of winning the prize.

Just remember — and we can’t say it enough — these rankings have to be used as a compass to point you in the right direction.  They can’t be used as GPS to tell you exactly where your favorite team will finish in a given year.

Finally, as a bonus, we’ve provided the combined class rankings for each school from 2002 through 2011 below.  Also listed are each school’s SEC record for the years 2006 through 2011.  Once again… even these rankings over a such a long period of time delivered a good ballpark read on how things would actually play out on the field over that six-season span of games:

And in case you’re wondering, the Rivals.com currently ranks the SEC recruiting classes as follows (from first to 14th): Alabama, Florida, Texas A&M, Tennessee, South Carolina, LSU, Auburn, Georgia, Vanderbilt, Arkansas, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Missouri and Kentucky.