2012-2013 NCAA Football Thread (National Signing Day)

[Major Harris]

It all comes down to coaching. A relevant NFL example would be the 49ers. They were collecting top 15 draft picks for years, and none of the coaches could put it all together until Harbaugh. At least half of their starting 22 was a 1st round draft pick. Some thing goes in college. Guys like Nick Saban can get the most out of those 4 and 5 stars, while guys like Jimbo Fisher can have 3 top 5 recruiting classes in a row and have only one conference championship to show for it.

yep. i am not sure wvu has ever had a top 20 recruiting class, but rich rod was able to take 3 stars and win bcs games.

[The Evil Genius]

Hot damn...4 star WR Shelton Gibson signed his LOI with the good guys.

Nice class WVU. Nice class.

---------- Post added February-6th-2013 at 10:26 AM ----------

This is too funny.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-...3Rpb25z;_ylv=3

Arkansas recruit’s mother reportedly steals his letter of intent and goes into hiding before he can fax it
By Frank Schwab | Dr. Saturday – 29 minutes ago
Email


RB Alex Collins (Rivals.com)
Many parents want their children to go to a certain school, usually one close to home. So in that regard, Alex Collins' mother isn't that different.
But Collins' mother might be the first two steal her son's national letter of intent, then run away and hide so her son couldn't fax in his official papers.
Collins is a Rivals.com four-star running back from Plantation, Fla., and he wanted to attend Arkansas. His mother wanted him to stay close to home. Collins didn't change his mind, but his mother reportedly went to extreme measures to keep him from making it official.

[Major Harris]

Stolen from another board:

I look forward to the ESPN 30 for 30 in twenty years about the miss. St. Recruiting class of 2013

[The Evil Genius]

Stolen from another board:

I look forward to the ESPN 30 for 30 in twenty years about the miss. St. Recruiting class of 2013

At least Ole Miss has a recent history of being top 20 (last year excluded) in the rivals class rankings.



---------- Post added February-6th-2013 at 11:46 AM ----------

I really hope this is a snowball effect - landing the big recruit leading to another.

Also, there really is no reason that Ole Miss shouldn't recruit with the best of them. They're within 100 miles of Memphis, an area rich with SEC level talent.

[DCranon21]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how Ole Miss landed this class. Outside the 2 five-star recruits they landed. Have you all seen the other recruits that some how landed? Also Hugh Freeze is not really a house hold name, but today he just made a name for himself.

[Spartacus87]

these things are a crapshoot. i spelled it out a while ago in a different thread regarding the last 10 years and looking at top 10 recruiting class rankings and subsequent bcs appearances. it doesn't match up well at all, though alabama has probably tipped the scales a bit recently.

It all comes down to coaching. A relevant NFL example would be the 49ers. They were collecting top 15 draft picks for years, and none of the coaches could put it all together until Harbaugh. At least half of their starting 22 was a 1st round draft pick. Some thing goes in college. Guys like Nick Saban can get the most out of those 4 and 5 stars, while guys like Jimbo Fisher can have 3 top 5 recruiting classes in a row and have only one conference championship to show for it.

This is like an annual NSD meme that despite the piles and piles of statistical data showing otherwise, continues to pop up.

Higher ranked recruits (4 and 5 stars) have a better chance of success in college than lower ranked recruits. Coaching and development (strength & conditioning as well as keeping them academically eligible and out of trouble) is a big part of it, for sure, but your program is not likely to build anything of significance without a lot of highly ranked talent to start with.

I really hope this is a snowball effect - landing the big recruit leading to another.

Also, there really is no reason that Ole Miss shouldn't recruit with the best of them. They're within 100 miles of Memphis, an area rich with SEC level talent.

Memphis, and Mississippi in general, is actually like a barren wasteland when it comes to "SEC level" talent.

Which is why, objectively, coaching for Ole Miss/Mississippi State is considered as difficult as coaching for Tennessee or Arkansas, as opposed to LSU, Alabama, UGA, or UF. There's not a lot of great talent in your own backyard to work with, so you have to try to lock the in-state kids down while relying on the ability to poach some high profile kids from out-of-state. You can't build a consistently winning program simply depending on your own homegrown talent, which makes recruiting incredibly hard, and yet the boosters and fans of those programs expect you to create a BCS championship level program anyway. Because you're in the $EC and all that.

And yeah...I'm not one to lob complaints about schools paying for recruits (throwing stones in glass houses and all...and if you think your school doesn't do it, you're either mistaken, or your school probably just doesn't have a highly competitive program...I also think these kids should get paid anyway but that's a whole different topic), but there is such a thing as possibly recruiting "too well." And Hugh Freeze is certainly walking that line with this class.

Ole Miss didn't win an SEC game from October of 2010 to October of 2012. 16 straight in-conference losses before beating Auburn this past October 13th. And the class they just landed is absolutely loaded with top talent at nearly every position.

Hugh Freeze also isn't known as any sort of offensive genius, like a Chad Morris, Dana Holgerson, or Gus Malzahn. He rode Michael Oher to his first job at high profile location, and learned the ins and outs of college football working under Ed Orgeron and Houston Nutt, both of whom have reputations preceding them when it comes to questionable recruiting tactics.

Needless to say, the whole situation has enough factors involved to raise eyebrows at the way this class turned out. It won't mean anything in the end unless Freeze can somehow repeat this recruiting magic over the next 2-3 years and build a talented program out of it (and hope that Nick Saban retires during that span as well...but we should all hope for that), but this class is pretty ridiculous.

Of course, the NCAA has also proven that it's completely incapable of leading a competent investigation on its own, even when it's a slam dunk (Miami's staff is already telling recruits that their investigation is over and done with), so unless an independent committee or the FBI or someone is going to come in and do the NCAA's work for them, or someone turns whistle blower, Ole Miss is probably safe.

[BeachSkin]

Some people here won't like to read this, but the SEC is killing it- again. The gap continues to widen between that league and everyone else.

I am convinced that Vanderbilt is here to stay. The world has changed over the past 5 - 10 years, and the education and job markets have become nothing short of vicious. Bearing that in mind, Vanderbilt is the only place in the world that can offer SEC Football *and* a world class education.

[Spartacus87]

The one thing about NSD, that I think most college football fans can agree on, is that every year there at least a couple of amusing images taken throughout the day (Alabama's fax camera girl, Isaiah Crowell picking UGA with an actual English bulldog puppy, etc.).

Stacy Coley, the best WR in Florida this year, surprises just about everyone and picked Miami over FSU, putting this cap on in the process:



Someone in the Clemson football office is also clearly a huge Twilight fan (Dabo maybe):

[ixcuincle]

I need a swag fitted

[Major Harris]

This is like an annual NSD meme that despite the piles and piles of statistical data showing otherwise, continues to pop up.

Higher ranked recruits (4 and 5 stars) have a better chance of success in college than lower ranked recruits. Coaching and development (strength & conditioning as well as keeping them academically eligible and out of trouble) is a big part of it, for sure, but your program is not likely to build anything of significance without a lot of highly ranked talent to start with.

Sure but it's like throwing poo against the wall some of it sticks. No one disputes that being near and acquiring (hand in hand) talent is advantageous. What I am saying is that many times ratings are off. I don't have the time or energy to do it all over again, but my outline of top ten recruiting classes compared to BCS appearances pretty well backed up what I am saying.

My point is this, you can't just say "OMG ole miss is going to be nasty" because they landed a nice recruiting class. Talent reigns supreme, but talent evaluation is far from exact science and coaching and developments role is greater than recruiting class rankings.

[LeesburgSkinFan]

The kids that signed yesterday were in 4th grade the last time a non-SEC team won the BCS Championship.

[pjfootballer]

How do you guys keep up with this? I don't follow HS football and following college just consists of me getting to know the current players on the teams I root for. I've never gotten into the national signing day thing as I just wouldn't know one HS guy from another. I don't know how you guys keep up with literally thousands of HS players across the country. I mean, kudos to you, but I'm not sure that's something I'd want to invest my time in, but that's just me.

[MattFancy]

How do you guys keep up with this? I don't follow HS football and following college just consists of me getting to know the current players on the teams I root for. I've never gotten into the national signing day thing as I just wouldn't know one HS guy from another. I don't know how you guys keep up with literally thousands of HS players across the country. I mean, kudos to you, but I'm not sure that's something I'd want to invest my time in, but that's just me.

I have a hard time taking too much stock in the rankings. I read where Manzel was a 3-star recruit when he came out. He just won the Heisman.

[Spartacus87]

Sure but it's like throwing poo against the wall some of it sticks. No one disputes that being near and acquiring (hand in hand) talent is advantageous. What I am saying is that many times ratings are off. I don't have the time or energy to do it all over again, but my outline of top ten recruiting classes compared to BCS appearances pretty well backed up what I am saying.

My point is this, you can't just say "OMG ole miss is going to be nasty" because they landed a nice recruiting class. Talent reigns supreme, but talent evaluation is far from exact science and coaching and developments role is greater than recruiting class rankings.

Most of the time, the ratings are pretty good at guessing how well a kid will be able to contribute. It's the famous "this 2 or 3 star became a great player/Heisman winner/NFL Pro Bowler" stories which prove to be the statistical outliers (and for the record, NFL success is a completely different thing from collegiate success, and the "star" rankings can't really be tied into that sort of discussion).

I'd also argue that using "BCS appearances" is a sort of a flawed tool to measure class rankings by. Everyone is pretty much in agreement with how flawed the BCS system is when it comes to picking teams for bowl games. A team like a Boise State or NIU can make BCS bowls and people can point to that as signs of how their recruiting rankings didn't matter, but on the other side of it, there's a reason teams like Alabama, LSU, UF, Texas, and USC have played for and won the actual national championship, while the "underdog" teams haven't been able to get close. And while voting is a part of that (although I'd also argue that teams like NIU and Boise also can benefit from voting to make BCS appearances), it's very, very rare that those teams' on-field performance actually measures up in any way to BCS Championship winners, the exception maybe being Boise State's defense for a couple of recent years.

This is the same BCS system that left UGA out of bowl this past year, while NIU played in the Orange Bowl. NIU was not a better team than UGA, but this sort of thing happens at least once a year when the bowls pick their match-ups.

For anyone who would like a further in-depth look at the real numbers behind the whole "recruiting rankings matter" argument, I'd suggest checking out this article from Matt Hinton:

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefoot...ball/21641769/

A 5 star has a 1 in 4 chance of becoming an All-American.
A 3 star has a 1 in 56 chance.

For team success, there's this tidbit:

On the final count, the higher-ranked team according to the recruiting rankings won almost exactly two-thirds of the time (66.4 percent of the time, to be exact), and every "class" as a whole had a winning record against every class ranked below it every single year. (The only exception, if it even qualifies, came last year, when "two-star" teams finished one game below .500 in head-to-head collisions with "one-star" teams. Elsewhere, the hierarchy held across every line.) The gap on the field also widened with the gap in the recruiting scores: At the extremes, "one-star" recruiting teams managed a grand total of six wins over "four-star" and "five-star" recruiters in 59 tries. Where a small handful of teams defied their rankings, none managed to do so as part of a larger group.

And as I recall from my discussion about this topic with PleaseBlitz last year, he made the point that some writers may be biased because they work for a website that promotes recruiting rankings. So if anyone would like to read an independent author who focuses on the same idea that "recruiting rankings matter," then I'd suggest checking out the CFB Matrix blog:

http://cfbmatrix.com/mainframe/

Like I said before, coaching and development definitely matter. But they're not the real lifeblood of a highly successful program. And the rankings aren't perfect, but they're getting better almost every year as the industry grows, and it's pretty difficult to find a statistical model that is 100% accurate, no matter what field you're talking about.

I have a hard time taking too much stock in the rankings. I read where Manzel was a 3-star recruit when he came out. He just won the Heisman.

For what it's worth, for the other finalists of the 2012 Heisman finalist class, Manti Te'o was a 5 star recruit, Marqise Lee was a high 4 star, and Braxton Miller was a high 4 star. Collin Klein was the only other standout from his original recruiting ranking, as he was a 3 star as well.

It seems that if there are two positions which are harder to gauge coming out of high school for the rankings, it's QB and OL.

QB I think in large part because many QBs today play in all sorts of different schemes in high school, especially compared to what they might run for their college coach, and OL in large part simply because it's extremely difficult to estimate how a 17 year old OL will develop physically by the time they're 20 or 21. It's not uncommon to see larger high school TEs become OL in college, or OL to switch to the DL (or vice versa).

Additionally, for recent Heisman winner and candidates, Cam Newton was a 5 star recruit and RG3 and Andrew Luck were both high 4 stars.

And one of the most talked about players in the country this past season (who also delivered maybe the most talked about play of the year), and who incidentally was not a Heisman candidate, was Jadeveon Clowney. And he was the #1 recruit in the country a couple of years ago.

How do you guys keep up with this? I don't follow HS football and following college just consists of me getting to know the current players on the teams I root for. I've never gotten into the national signing day thing as I just wouldn't know one HS guy from another. I don't know how you guys keep up with literally thousands of HS players across the country. I mean, kudos to you, but I'm not sure that's something I'd want to invest my time in, but that's just me.

I used to be really into it when I was in college and had more time on my hands (and the buzz of the new recruiting class was going on around me in Tallahassee), but now I just casually follow it until maybe the last 2 or 3 weeks of the recruiting period before NSD. Unless there's a big story about a high 4 star or a 5 star committing to FSU, I only check in on it maybe once every 3 or 4 months.

It's also a good diversion in the summer time, when college football news is dead before Fall camps start and preseason stuff gets underway. Gotta get my fix somehow.

I personally could not care less about most NFL draft stuff, since that's the real crapshoot. Talk to me about upcoming recruiting camps and high profile targets who will be attending, and I'll listen; start bringing up mock drafts and trade down scenarios and I'll become bored to death.

[MattFancy]

I'm not saying that the rankings are useless, but I just don't put a ton of stock into them. They usually seem to be pretty close to what really happens. But, like you said, coaching and development play a big role in all of it too. But for example, just because Ole Miss has a top 5 class this year, I don't think that automatically means Ole Miss will be a power in the next few years.