Power 4 2025 Recruiting Rankings: Week 6
At our first check in on the state of the 2025 recruiting class, Ohio State reigns supreme
We may be late to the party, but I’m glad we’re showing up. Only 10 weeks out from the beginning of the Early Signing Period, we’re revealing our initial recruiting class rankings for the Class of 2025. It’ll come as a shock to no one that the SEC dominates the upper ends of the rankings, but the pack is led overall by the class of the Big Ten this season: Oregon and Ohio State.
Ohio State’s nation-best class is a defender-heavy group with 12 of their top 20, including 3 of their 4 5-stars, coming on that side of the ball. Interestingly, they do not seem to be concerned with the OL this cycle with only one OL in their top 20. Oregon has a top-heavy class, with the fewest commitments of any school in the top 5 but tied for the 2nd-most 5 stars. Brian Kelly’s yankee LSU staff has likely outrecruited their expecations considering there’s functionally no daylight between them, Alabama, and Georgia. And it stings for me, personally, since the Tigers managed to steal away #1 QB Bryce Underwood directly out of Michigan’s backyard.
Since this is the inaugural TEP recruiting rankings, we’ll spend less time here focusing on the intricacies of each class and talk about the methodology to come to this rankings. This process will evolve over time, and since I’m using publicly available data I plan on sharing all the nitty gritty details. This is my first time designing any sort of wholistic recruiting ranking, so I encourage any feedback you all have!
The rankings you see above are really simple. I took the 20 highest-rated recruits in each Power 4 class and averaged out their industry average ratings. I did the minor bit of cleaning by excluding all players without industry ratings. I took the industry ratings for each recruit from On3 and didn’t attempt to calculate them myself. This is in part due to laziness - it would be way more annoying to scrape each individual rating for any given recruit - and because On3’s industry rating calculation is what I would’ve done anyways. It is a weighted average between the ratings supplied by On3 (35%), 247Sports (35%), ESPN (20%), and Rivals (10%). Considering the level of upkeep and transparency with each recruiting outlet, I think these are fair weights for something as uncertain as projecting forward high school athletes’ performances.
Before I talk about my own process and what I think the flaws are, I’ll catch you up on how other outlets do their team rankings. 247Sports calculates their team scores according to a weighted sum, where the weights follow a Gaussian distribution. I’m honestly not sure what following a Gaussian distribution means in this case, but it has the effect of weighing the highest rated player in a class far more than the lowest rated player. As an example, in Alabama’s highest rated recruit in 2024, Ryan Williams, contributed 29.82 points towards their total while 4-star edge Noah Carter (ranked #82 nationally) contributed only 7.44. So according to 247, Ryan Williams is worth 4x as much as Noah Carter in determining how good Alabama’s class is overall. It is also worth noting that since this is a sum, it does slightly bias towards teams with larger classes.
On3’s team rating system requires trolling through less forum posts to figure out, but is a bit opaque. They state that their team ratings, “compile the highest-rated commits for each team up to a total based on a rolling average of current total commitments among Power 5 schools.” Additionally, they claim that they give no bonuses for extra commitments and limited deductions for having fewer than average commitments. Anecdotally, a lot of the results from my naive approach are pretty close to On3’s ratings. So I think they’re doing something similar where they have fancier means to grab an average rating of some top N recruits and have some means to give a negative bias for smaller classes. But that’s just a guess based off very little evidence.
We can see in rating recruiting classes that there is a pretty stark philosophical divide. 247 believes that a class is mostly defined by its best players. On3 seems to think that, within some bounds, all players in a class should be roughly equally weighted. The final results end up being pretty similar most of the time, but this is a philosophical grounding you have to seriously consider. I tend to lean towards On3’s end of the spectrum since college football games aren’t won with a handful of players.
The main downside of considering all players equally though, is that dealing with varying class sizes gets much more difficult. While I think it makes sense to say that the 15th-best recruit in a class is basically as important as the 5th-best, I don’t think it holds that a class with 30 recruits is certainly better than a class with 23 recruits. This is easy enough to adjust for though. If we only look at most of the class, then we’ll still capture that the bulk of the class is treated equally while not giving undue credit to Syracuse’s 29 commitments. The exact choice of 20 for this was arbitrary, but according to my Very Scientific And Correct vibes it seems to work for this purpose.
The other end is tricker for me to think of a good solution to. Florida State, Oregon, and Clemson all have smaller than average classes, but since all of the players are highly rated they’re higher in my rankings than On3 or 247. I think in the abstract they should be punished for having smaller classes since that can lead into depth problems, but that creates issues with the problem of wanting to treat players closer to equally. I don’t have a good solution for this problem yet, so for now I’m going to leave it so that we have something to iterate on and learn from. I would love to hear som suggestions! But in the mean time I’ll do some testing and keep you all updated.
This will be a recurring article series, and I promise not all of them will just be rambling about process!
Same here as far as class size goes - having a deeper pool to draw from is an advantage, even if it feels a little “unfair” to penalize a school for getting more recruits. More recruits means a better chance to contest a title.
Not sure I have a solution off the top of my head but I find the class size conversation super interesting. If you just want to rate the classes as they stand now I think it matters less, but if you are a coach and really trying to project class contributions to the team roughly 2-3 years from now it would make intuitive sense to bias towards larger class sizes given the inexact nature of 17 year old player development. Would love to see more research on that topic