Update to Team Recruiting Ranking Methodology

We are now giving downgrades based on class size!

Oct 03, 2024

I heard your feedback on last week’s rankings, and we will be making it so that smaller recruiting classes are penalized in future rankings. The reason for penalizing smaller classes is twofold:

If you have small high school recruiting classes, you will run into roster construction problems at some point in the future. Basically, can’t fix all your roster issues via the transfer portal!
If you bring in fewer players during the offseason, you are less likely to bring in any number of good players (within reasonable bounds).

With this in mind, how are we actually going to penalize smaller recruiting classes? We will assume that if a recruiting class has less than 20 commits, then we’ll assume they’ll bring in N - 20 walk-on recruits (N = # of commitments). This is the same as assuming they’ll bring on replacement level players, replacement level here meaning a low-level 3 star (specifically recruits with an 82.5 industry rating), and throw them into their top 20 recruits’ average rating. If a program has more than 20 commitments, then we give them no adjustment.

As an explicit example, as of 9/29 Florida State had 12 commitments for their class of 2025 recruiting class. To calculate their average top 20 recruits’ ratings, we then add 8 3 stars with an industry rating of 82.5 to their existing 12 recruits, and then run the numbers. I’m not sure what this will look like earlier in the recruiting cycle, but we’ll figure that out when we get to it.

Here’s what the new rankings look like:

High-level take away? Smaller classes have moved down the list! Exactly like we wanted. If you want the exhaustive list of changes you can reference the old list, but here are the changes I’d like to highlight:

Small Class Changes: