SMQ: College football teams that historically punch above, below recruiting weight

Recruiting is not perfect, but hauling in top prospects correlates to success. Which college football teams recruit better, worse than one might expect?

When it comes to college football, there is the season that takes place from the end of August through the beginning of January on the gridiron. Then there is the season that takes place year-round, the perpetual recruiting battles as coaches and their staffs seek out the best possible raw talent to entice to come play in their systems.

The second, omnipresent season naturally fuels the first season in a positive feedback loop. Success on the recruiting trail begets success on the field, which in turn brings in more and better prospects to yield bigger trophies for the cases and grander accolades to boast for decades to come.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work out that way. Sometimes a team can be in the hottest recruiting territory in the country and fail to land a decent quantity of blue-chip talent. A team can continue to falter even when presented with ideal conditions to construct a winning roster.

Conversely, teams far from the talent-rich hotbeds of the country can still cobble together top-shelf squads by recruiting further afield and punching above their weight class. We have seen teams emerge among the national contenders in the 21st century by turning things around in the recruiting rankings.

This week, Sunday Morning Quarterback evaluates the top five teams to make their mark as better recruiters than their geographic situation would dictate as well as the five worst teams at failing to live up to the expectations of their proximity to talent.

First, though, let’s look at a chart

This chart demonstrates several key points at once. The first column of numbers indicates where teams finished on average in the 247Sports composite team recruiting rankings between 2013 and 2018. The lower the number, the better the raw talent recruited by a particular team.

The second column of numbers indicates the average number of blue-chip prospects coming out of a team’s state over the past five years. The higher the number in this column, the greater the expectation that the recruiting average will be a lower number.

The last column, fairly self-explanatory, is each school’s winning percentage over the past four seasons.

When you put these figures together, it paints a clearer picture of how well we might expect teams to recruit, how well they are actually recruiting against that expectation, and whether that recruiting is translating to results on the field.

(Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Which teams recruit better than expected?

Just like recruiting itself, evaluating and ranking recruiting efforts is also an inexact science. In general, though, there were a couple of criteria that we factored in. First, the team must have a winning percentage of at least .600 between 2014 and 2017. Second, teams must come from a state that produces an average of fewer than eight blue-chip prospects per season. And third, the team must average a top-20 spot in the composite recruiting rankings.

Only five programs met that benchmark. These are all familiar names to college football fans. Four out of the five are historic powerhouses whose recognizable brands continue to draw recruits despite a dearth of high-school talent in their home states. The last is a team that vaulted among the nouveau riche of the sport by building up its brand as one of the most identifiable in all of college football.

1. Notre Dame Fighting Irish (independent) — Notre Dame earns its spot at the head of the list thanks to what might just be the most valuable brand in all of college football. The Fighting Irish have their own exclusive television contract and get to call their own shots in terms of how they align with Power Five conferences without being within one of them. They are located in Indiana, a state that produces on average fewer than five blue-chip prospects per year, and yet they still finish on average among the top 11 teams in the country in recruiting and average eight wins a season.
2. Oklahoma Sooners (Big 12) — Oklahoma has dominated the Big 12 in recent years, living up to the weight of their historic legacy with nearly two decades of consistent success under Bob Stoops and now Lincoln Riley. The Sooners have done so despite hailing from a state that produces just four blue-chip recruits per season. Even with that roadblock, Oklahoma finishes between 13th and 14th on average every season in recruiting and wins almost four of every five games they play. (Playing next door to recruit-heavy Texas certainly helps.)
3. Oregon Ducks (Pac-12) — Oregon has burst onto the scene over the past two decades with a massive infusion of cash from alumnus and Nike founder Phil Knight. The Ducks have branded themselves as one of the most innovative teams in college football, with flashy offenses and flashy uniforms. That has helped translate into high recruiting rankings, with Oregon averaging 19th in the nation each season in a state that produces only two blue-chip prospects per year. Even with a few down seasons, the Ducks also win more than three out of every five games as well thanks to the talent infusion from their nationwide recruiting.
4. Michigan Wolverines (Big Ten) — Michigan is a program with incredible cachet as a historic powerhouse. They have also benefitted from the arrival of prominent alumnus and former Wolverines quarterback Jim Harbaugh as their head coach in 2015. The Wolverines have struggled to break through in a loaded Big Ten East, but they have still averaged more than eight wins a season in the past four years. They have done this despite being located in a state with only seven blue-chip prospects per season and another Power Five rival in state to poach some of that talent.
5. Clemson Tigers (ACC) — Clemson is the one team on this list that has won a national championship in the College Football Playoff era, ending a 35-year drought when they took down Alabama in the 2016-2017 national championship game. Though it is located in the heartland of college football talent, South Carolina itself produces just 5.6 blue-chip prospects per season. With the Gamecocks and other SEC and ACC teams trying to get that talent as well, Clemson has done well to maintain an average top-12 recruiting ranking as they have dominated the ACC in recent years.

(Photo by Bob Levey/Getty Images)

Which teams recruit worse than expected?

There are always going to be winners and losers when it comes to recruiting within a given state. Not every Power Five program can land every blue-chip prospect within their state — even if they are the only Power Five program in their state.

But some programs seem to consistently fall short of what we might reasonably expect from a major school in a talent-rich state. The next four teams on this list are here because they hover right around .500 in the standings on average, give or take a loss here and there. They are all situated in recruiting hotbeds that average at least 25 blue-chip prospects per year. And they all rank on average outside the top 30 in recruiting nationally.

1. Texas Tech Red Raiders (Big 12) — Texas Tech plays in the West Texas outpost of Lubbock, far from the more glamorous cities in the Lone Star State. Though they have consistently been members of the Big 12 since its inception, they have struggled to maintain the same level of recruiting that other conference members manage annually. In a state that produces more than 45 blue-chip prospects per high-school class, the Red Raiders on average rank 47th nationally in recruiting. That has translated to a .438 winning percentage in the past four years under Kliff Kingsbury.
2. California Golden Bears (Pac-12) — Though they represent the flagship university in a state that produces nearly 40 blue-chip prospects per year, the Golden Bears come nowhere near the level of recruiting produced by other schools in the state of California. Not only are they behind the teams in Los Angeles area, but Cal also fall short of the recruiting taking place at Bay Area rival Stanford. Cal is a sub-.500 team that regularly comes in around 45th or 46th in the composite recruiting rankings each year.
3. Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (ACC) — Georgia Tech is actually a relatively successful team, with a .546 record as a member of the ACC. The Yellow Jackets, though, regularly get beat in recruiting by intrastate out-of-conference rival Georgia. The state averages more than 28 blue-chip recruits per year, but the Yellow Jackets rank just 55th nationally on average in recruiting each year. Part of that comes down to the triple-option offense that Paul Johnson runs in Atlanta, which is anachronistic in this era of college football and subsequently doesn’t translate well to many top-tier recruits.
4. Baylor Bears (Big 12) — Baylor is an enigma of sorts. Historically they have been a punching bag in the Southwest Conference and then the Big 12. A recent run of success under former head coach Art Briles helped improve the fortunes some in Waco, but the stigma of historic irrelevance still casts a thin shadow over the program. Baylor is a smaller denominational university, reducing the resources they have to recruit relative to bigger Lone Star rivals like Texas or Texas A&M. Even so, the Bears rank 33rd in recruiting in a state that produces more top-shelf talent than any other in the country.

(Photo by Robert Laberge/Getty Images)

What does it all mean?

Geography and historic success are not inherently guarantors that a team is going to recruit either poorly or well in the future. Teams can be endowed with perfect location, a track record of great performance, and still fall flat when it comes to landing recruits. Sometimes it is a matter of the system employed by a school. Other times it might be the coach, or whether the school is private or public, denominational or secular, or located in a specific area of a state.

Conversely, a school can be situated far away from the childhood homes of the prospects they are recruiting. They can be a historical afterthought in the grand scheme of things. And, with the right combination of landmark performances, well-heeled boosters, and a style of play that is attractive to a generation of teenagers, any program can theoretically rise up from the quagmire of mediocrity to make a mark nationally.

Maintaining that success rate is far more difficult. Even blueblood programs in great locations can have stretches where they punch above or below more historic recruiting levels. The data are spotty prior to 2008 in the 247sports recruiting rankings, so this chart compares the 2013-2018 average from the first chart against an average of the 11 recruiting classes between 2008 and 2018. The last column shows the differential between the recent recruiting average and the historic levels.

As this demonstrates, it isn’t just teams that historically punch below their weight like California or Georgia Tech that factor on this list. Powerhouse schools like Texas, Florida, USC, and Oklahoma can also go through downturns in their recruiting against historic norms. Often that is the result of coaching changes, a year or two of performances that fall below expectations, or other flux surrounding the program.

Some teams have the combination of factors that provide ready access to a plethora of talent. And some of the schools that have such access actually manage to capitalize on that access to land top-tier classes, while others fail to make those advantages work in their favor.

Some schools are trapped behind the 8-ball, stuck in an odd geographic location and without any legacy to build upon. And some of the schools with such barriers surmount them, while others remain mired in mediocrity.

The fun of college football is that these things are both cyclical and impermanent.