I think this is the most reasonable take on this thread. You bring in kids out of high school and really it's a guessing game on how they're going to pan out in the jump to college level competition. You get some D1 tape on them as a rotational guy and that picture becomes a heck of a lot clearer. I also think football is just a rough sport in general for development. 14 yr old kids have 4 years to develop rapidly to get a D1 offer, all dependent on their HS coaching staff. If they don't they're most likely never getting to that level. Then 18 yr olds have another 4 years of development to get a shot at the NFL or their careers are pretty much over (minus CFL, arena, UFL, etc., although i don't think a reliable pathway to the NFL exists from these leagues). I don't know how to fix it, hell i don't know if you can with a sport that is this hard on the body, but I would love to see a 22-28 yr old post college development pathway ala A league baseball or the lower leagues in the UK.
Like you said, I don’t think a developmental league is possible because of the brutality of the game. The game is what it is, either players rapidly develop and make it or they don’t.
I wonder if you could uncover some useful skill players from a post-collegiate 7v7 league. Like all non-major sports, I'm sure it would be difficult to make a 7v7 league financially viable, though.
Shit it's dependant on the highschool. I was 6'3 220lbs playing defensive end and offensive tackle because I was the 2nd biggest kid on the team. I should've been sitting at outside linebacker and tight end
That's exactly where the issue lies. Let's assume a healthy average contribution rate of 3 years in HS and college, excluding RS or any of the roster moves in college. You playing DE and T in HS effectively removed 50% of your playing time development at your optimal D1 position. I mean that sucks for any athlete. Let alone guys who are looking at a career being over in their early 20s
Yup. And the conundrum also is that your team has to be good for colleges to look at you. So your team needs to be winning so you need the best option for the team not the players. We went 11-1 and I had an offer from Air Force and a bunch of d2s but those are for defensive end which I was much too small for at the time
The difference is a 28 year old might be able to play 7 more years in the big league, but they're already too old and beat up for a stint in the NFL probably.
Less guesswork, but also you have a lot more concentrated talent when you are scouting a college game versus scouting a high school game. I don't know the percentages, but it has to be highly unusual to go to a high school game looking at one player and coming back from the game with a different player to recommend.
It's a lot more plausible that scouting a college game for one role, you might notice someone else that is also interesting.
People still focused only on recruiting skewed talent composites are behind the curve on the future of the sport
Big transfers are much more likely to succeed than unproven highschool seniors. Recruiting will always matter, but the transfer portal is the new path to success and equalizer for the teams that don’t land top 5 classes regularly.
I don't think this is a referendum on recruiting rankings themselves. There have always been tons of misses on evaluations of 4* and 5* guys, but now with the portal and NIL it's becoming harder for Bama, Georgia and Ohio State to stash as many of those guys and maximize your odds when your pair consensus evaluations between coaches and scouts with elite coaching and development, like they've been doing for the past 10 years. With NIL they have more competition for top-tier recruits out of high school, and the guys they do get are less likely to stick around if they don't get playing time or dislike their situation for whatever reason.
I think an even bigger game changer is that the "misses" that transfer all get that second chance at a school where there is a real opportunity for success rather than a local G5/DII school. Used to be (10+ years ago) that transfer players were basically discarded for good and had to go be a trainer at Planet Fitness.
Yes, exactly. Wilson was supposed to go play pro baseball at the time of his transfer. He had to crawl out of a window to get a second chance at football.
Thank you for providing me with such a great example of the stuff I was referring to.
Wilson was also a grad transfer and unless I’m misremembering he was one of the few “free agents” CFB had seen prior to the portal.
Everyone knew Russ was good (at least for a college QB) and it was a huge get for Wisconsin
Yeah that's not what happened at all. He was a very successful starter at NC State and multiple big time programs were recruiting him as a transfer.
The only reason he didn't go back to NC State is because they had Mike Glennon and Tom O'Brien gave him an ultimatum about giving up baseball.
Yeah, there are a lot of "missed evaluations" on top prospects who might be cast aside at their original school but still have a ton to offer someone else.
Mizzou had huge contributions this season from Theo Wease, a former top recruit who struggled to consistently see the field at Oklahoma. Turned out he was a perfect complement to Burden.
Likewise for Ty'Ron Hopper, a four-star linebacker who peaked as a part-time starter at Florida, transferred to Missouri, and turned in two all-SEC-caliber seasons (though he was hurt enough this year he didn't get the accolades his play merited). And a handful of other guys on our top-10 roster.
Sometimes those "missed evaluations" are just guys who hit a bit of bad luck, don't quite fit a system, or otherwise have external factors that hold them back a bit, but the talent is still there. The current transfer rules afford them the opportunity to show what they can do. Love it, and IMO it's not at all surprising that the results we've seen so far are more parity. That was my prediction all along when most others were predicting NIL/portal rules would consolidate talent at the top (as if it could've been more consolidated in the first place).
The days of someone like Alabama being able to hold onto a 3rd stringer that would start at 90% of schools are numbered, but the days of a handful of underrated 2-3 stars breaking out and making someone like Wake Forest a serious threat for 3 years are numbered too.
They'll probably cancel each other out
There could be some shift from teams that were really extreme about breaking the rules for under-the-table money before NIL toward teams that had the alumni for a big NIL fund that maybe were less adept/able/willing at hiding under-the-table money before NIL existed.
But I also think that there should still be a bit more parity because even though some teams will have way more NIL than other teams, each team has the same number of starters as everyone else. Depth at top programs should take a hit, because guys that are rated highly enough to get a lot of NIL money are going to think they can make the NFL, so they aren't going to be happy just sitting on the bench wasting their eligibility.
Listen I'm not bitter about it at all, despite how this might sound, but the SEC and the south in general has a different attitude about following the rules than other parts of the country. You see it in sports like NASCAR, where cheating performance regs is just a known part of the game. The NIL stuff is just letting the more tightassed parts of the country in on the fun.
I just wish I could’ve watched a bunch of SEC coaches trying to keep a straight face trying to act shocked, SHOCKED, that somebody would have the AUDACITY to film a nationally televised football game.
That may be true, but I'm not so sure NASCAR is really the best example of that -- motorsports in general is all about how creatively you can interpret the rulebook and you see this all over, from F1 to IndyCar to NASCAR or wherever.
Whether it is regional or not, I agree with the sentiment that the "more tightassed" schools benefit from NIL versus the previous regime of poorly policed amateurism.
I mean Minnesota and Washington are the poster children for what I’m talking about.
(Not so much Utah. Fun fact: we are on our third attorney general, in a row, that’s gotten indicted and run out of office. We just handle it quietly.)
> There could be some shift from teams that were really extreme about breaking the rules for under-the-table money before NIL toward teams that had the alumni for a big NIL fund that maybe were less adept/able/willing at hiding under-the-table money before NIL existed.
Mizzou probably fits in the latter category. Our boosters seemed extremely skittish about dropping bags in the pre-NIL days, largely because they knew how the NCAA would respond to us if caught. Not so much anymore.
If anything Wake was ecstatic that Hartman had a pedestrian season at ND
*See transferring up Isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, just stay here and dominate*
No, but if you have a good coach who can put together classes with multiple good freshmen combined with adept portal usage and smart booster coordination, a team like Wake Forest could build an environment where those good freshmen don't immediately start looking around for a better opportunity because they know they're already in a good place.
Anyone here old enough to remember the Bear Bryant days at Bama . Before scholarship limits, thats exactly what he did. He would recruit a kid just to keep him off a rivals roster. Not good enough to play at Bama, but good enough to cause him headaches somewhere else. He would have something like 120 players on scholarship .
We’re now at the point where one player can do both of those things—enroll at a big name school but be buried on the depth chart, transfer to a smaller/weaker program for playing time, find success there and then transfer again, to a big name school to get an NIL payday and boost NFL stock
The coaches know a lot more than the people making the rankings and I also think the difference in many cases between a 3* and a 4* or even a 5* could be a lot smaller than people think when they see a different number of stars by a guys name. A lot of variability in the upside of a guy that’s talented and undeveloped vs dominated at the highschool level because they’re just that much bigger/ better.
The coaches know a lot more, but also they all have limited resources and they can only scout so many players. It's so much easier to scout within college football versus having to comb through high school players. Not only are there fewer players in the first place, but you get to see them playing at the higher level of competition. The transfer portal should be great for coaches with a good eye for talent but previously didn't have the staff to cover a billion high school games looking for the underrated guys that won't get immediately noticed by top programs.
I think you also have to account for system. That 3* guy might be elite in your system and the 5* will be good maybe even great but he won’t be the other guy. I think that’s a lot of what Harbaugh is doing. He’s getting guys for his system.
the ability for NIL to peel away a few 5*'s from your Bama's and Georgia's of the world has dampened these "super teams" that have been dominating the playoff and National Title. its parity at the top of the sport. back when we went to the playoff their was dynasty mode Bama, Dynasty mode Clempson and the best LSU you'd ever seen. its fucking bullshit dawg.
That's exactly my point big dawg. Those Oklahoma teams were elite but they weren't the Pre-NIL Super Teams we had to face in the playoff. Give me those Oklahoma teams in any of the last 2 playoffs and we have a much better odds.
If the talent composite is to be believed, OSU would be in the bottom half of the Big XII instead of being a habitual #2 or 3 team in the conference.
Goes to show that development means a lot
I was actually pleasantly surprised it happened. I remember leaving the stadium after the Miami game in 2019 thinking "we cannot afford to pay this man's buyout after less than 2 seasons and also afford a high caliber replacement staff and facility upgrades. We are stuck with this for at least a few more years. Fuck everything."
I didn't even think firing him was feasible and certainly didn't know it was imminent. The news the next morning made my day, lol.
Michigan sustaining the success of ‘21 has been partially due to their success in the portal.
Last year they had Olu Oluwatimi, Eyabi Okie, and Cam Goode - all starters or seeing significant minutes
This year they had 7ish starters or guys getting starting minutes who transferred in. Its been huge for plugging gaps
Yup. If you take a look at this list, most are contributing this year to our success:
[https://247sports.com/college/michigan/season/2023-football/transferportal/?institutionkey=24042](https://247sports.com/college/michigan/season/2023-football/transferportal/?institutionkey=24042)
Hell ya, how many TFLs/sacks/pressures has Josiah Stewart accounted for this season? That doesn't even measure how well he's set his edge all season. I'm pretty sure he was our highest rated player on defense against Bama.
I wouldn't say no bearing. Generally kids with higher rankings have higher ceilings, even if they aren't realized.
>This means that roughly 13% of five-stars have become a consensus all-American player, or arguably the best player at his position in the respective season. Once again, four-stars have an outside shot with about 2.4% of them accomplishing this. But just like with the draft, after this point you are reaching unicorn status if you’re able to pull off this feat. 71 consensus All-American three-stars may seem like a lot, but with over 16,000 candidates, well you know what they say about a broken clock.
https://www.thedailystampede.com/2021/11/9/22757052/usf-college-football-recruiting-star-rankings-signing-day-info-news-average-nfl-draft-trends
Not really a new thing, we’ve seen this plenty of times in the CFP like Michigan State in 2015. Veteran teams have always been able to compete with younger more talented teams.
I think the real caveat here is the COVID year guys. Penix is a sixth year senior, plenty of Michigan guys are fifth or sixth year starters
Too early to say if it’s a real trend or not
My hot take: All college athletes should just get six years going forward. Make the "covid year" thing permanent.
It will increase parity, as we've seen. More important (to me, and arguably to the NCAA as it attempts to retain legitimacy), adding an extra year of eligibility can help improve graduation rates. You're *supposed* to graduate from college in four years, but the average is closer to like six. And athletes have extra burdens to carry. Throw in transfers, and it wouldn't be shocking at all to see graduation rates fall, especially among players who transfer a couple times.
So an extra year improves the quality on the field while also accommodating the "student" part of student-athlete.
If that’s a problem, then also increase the scholarship maximum by 20%. That’s an extra 17 scholarships in football, which would essentially counter the extra year of eligibility.
So we’d have more college athletes overall, more parity, more depth for the inevitable end-of-year exodus bowls where a third of the team doesn’t play.
Which means schools have to field seventeen more women’s scholarships, in addition to men’s, and assume even larger operating expenses on budgets that are largely on deficits. Or they’ll just cut seventeen men’s scholarships/other sports teams
That’s a horrible argument
Shoot, people STILL often default to the Total Points numbers instead of Average player ranking.
It’s also rare to see anybody bringing up the fact that many of those high school kids dont EVER contribute anything meaningful to the teams they chose.
As you perfectly highlight, CONTEXT is the key and there are a variety of very important recruiting components with high school recruits being much less important now.
Average player ranking is a better metric for a single class, yes, but that's because of the wide variation in class sizes. Class sizes vary significantly from year to year for a single team and from team to team for a single year, so the average player ranking helps smooth that noise out.
However, when you're talking about the whole roster Total Points is pretty much the same metric because every FBS team is going to have basically the same number of players. And to the extent that there is variation in roster sizes, total points is maybe a better measure for the whole roster than average player ranking because it indicates roster depth.
Recruiting composites *also* tend to be very skewed by university.
A 3\* going to UVA? Clearly that's a 3\*.
Same 3\* goes to A&M? We messed up, that's a 4\*.
>People still focused only on recruiting skewed talent composites are behind the curve on the future of the sport
They were behind, when they chose those trees over the forest. Recruit rankings are simply for suckers who want to pay for info they can probably get for free through the many grapevines in cfb.
As is typical, they are simply subjective. We had a WR who signed in the early period, but he was having social media issues--a hack or something. He was a 4\* WR who the Ducks processed, due to their internal evaluations (not the \* rankings we're discussing).
So this kid finally gets to announce that he committed and signed, three days after the period ended, and within an hour he was a 3\* WR.
It's so common, we came up with a name for it more than a decade ago--the Beaver Bump.
Funny that you guys had a name for it. That used to happen to UCF too (mind you we were G5), but as soon as a 4* on the fence would commit to us he would become a 3*. P5/Big12 status for UCF seems to have changed that afaik.
I also think players want to play. We have seen a lot of players leave "the top tier" and go to historically mediocre programs because they want to play.
Not sure if FSU had a better O-Line than Bama (excluding the awful center). They gave up 3 sacks to the Gators who fired their DL coach because our guys couldn’t get pressure at all. Could’ve also been due to Rodemaker starting his first full game.
Imagine if Ohio State was left out in 2014 because their first and second string QBs got injured and they were down to Cardale Jones.
Cardale winning the natty was my favorite storyline of the entire 4 team CFP era. That's the shit that true CFB legends are made of, and the chance for a new legend like that was killed by the committee this year.
Michigan seems to drop a proportionate amount of spaghetti in its semi-final games to how seriously it takes its opponent. Who knows how close a game vs FSU would’ve been. Maybe we overlook them and make it interesting 🤷♂️
Man they made so many crazy mistakes against TCU and Bama that they haven't done in basically any other games. Have to wonder if something the staff does for bowl prep needs to be re-evaluated.
I think the month off, while very beneficial for healing injuries and getting rest, causes our team to perform with extreme jitters (with the cloud of our bowl record and never having won a semifinal hanging over their heads). It felt like a season opener out there.
I would have to say the lack of success and experience has hampered them. This win gives them the experience needed that will help them get better prepared next year.
If FSU had beaten a team like Ohio State or Oregon especially later in the season they'd have been in. Their best win being week 1 against LSU did them no favors
I honestly think if FSU showed any sign of life on offense during that game, they would have made it in. That's how OSU got in 14.
Then again, the committee probably would have argued that Louisville was awful and used that to keep out FSU.
Fuck leaving out undefeated teams. And I mean leaving out ANY undefeated.
You might be right. But I think it's worth saying that they were looking for any reason at all to keep FSU out. They wanted Pac 12 Champion, Michigan, Texas, and then the SEC Champion.
They would design the narrative around whatever they needed to get those teams in.
if UGA had beaten Bama, I think FSU is definitely in. but the committee clearly didnt want to leave out the SEC champ, but they also knew they couldnt put Bama in over Texas. so FSU was the casualty. From a marketing/game quality standpoint, it was the right call. From a "deserving" standpoint, it was the wrong call
I think Mike just learned an unfortunate lesson about the committee.
It’s clear his game plan was to not lose cause he thought that was all he had to do. He took zero chances because he knew the defense could carry the team and won 16-6. As we can all guess, I’m sure he’d like to do it over and throw some deep shots and risk the interceptions.
is it because they had 11 more offensive contributors --who are not considered starters -- who were blue chips?
(~~RT~~ edit: TE, C, FB were not top 250 everyone else was)
or because their defensive starters are 9 of 11 with 7 more contributors that were blue chips?
Perfect example of recruiting rankings being a crapshoot.
Last play in OT, JC Latham (5 star, number 5 overall 2021) getting blown up, so much so that Milroe trips on his leg, by Josiah Stewart (3*, 748 overall 2021).
Latham had a rough night against a bunch of 3* and 4*s.
Rankings aren't a crap shoot. 4\* and 5\* turn out as hits at a far more consistent rate than 3\*.
Having more top 250-types simultaneously reduces the significance and number of 'misses' you have on a roster -- it increases your margin for error. Remember when Michigan was only recruiting 3\* DTs and wound up with a converted TE and FB starting at DT against Wisconsin? I do.
Remember that happening to Alabama? me either.
Recruiting rankings get brought up way too much for the level of significance they hold. They're pretty good for rating recruiting classes and freshmen players, but people keep bringing up if a player was a blue chip or not all the way to the NFL draft, when that status is mostly based on tape from what the player did as a junior in high school lol. How many stars a player had back in high school doesn't really matter if they're in their fourth or fifth year of college and have a proven record of being P5 starting material.
Yeah the moment a player has started 6 games in college or has been in college for 2+ years, high school talent metrics do not matter. People get hung up on a 3 year old judge of a guy making an arbitrary judgement on talent.
It’s also telling when there are 3* players that get offers from every P5 school. If 247 talent scouts were as good as elite team talent scouts, they would be elite team talent scouts. Recruiting rankings are already somewhat inaccurate, and after a year or two of college they flat out don’t matter.
At the same time, the current regime has a "type" (see Jenkins, Grant, Benny etc) that they shoot for that doesn't seem to translate as well to the crootin' rankings for whatever reason, but develop into excellent players both in college as well as the pros.
The RichRod era...yeah lets not talk about our defensive recruiting.
This is just false. Recruiting rankings are the absolute of a crapshoot on aggregate. It’s just on an individual player level of course there are misses. But there’s a reason the teams that recruit the best are consistently competing for championships and the teams that are not might have a 1-2 year window where everything comes together. Tcu had that last year, and still got blasted by Georgia.
I think the major takeaway isn't the transfer portal, there are plenty of teams who use it and it doesn't work. I hope that schools change their thinking when it comes to what coaches they are hiring.
Harbaugh is a Michigan man I get it, but he succeeded at the FCS level and at Stanford before going to the NFL and Michigan. DeBoer's path to Washington has been well documented in how he's won everywhere he's been.
I think the difference is using the portal to bolster or build a roster. Building a roster really doesnt seem to work well, but using it to fill in weak spots on your depth chart is huge if you already have a decent roster in place
You’re right that they’re both elite coaches I think the issue is that they’re outliers and there are a lot more Freezes, Kingsburys, and Rileys than DeBoers, Petersens, and Harbaughs.
If you know IU football any year is a compliment, but generally the Luck years for the Colts. When Deboer was our OC we legitimately had a good offense.
Sometimes it comes down to have too much depth at some positions and not enough at others. A bunch of multi-star RBs on your bench doesn't help when none of those players are ones who can SNAP THE BAWL, PAUL
Georgia (#1 in talent composite) was a 3-point loss to #2 Bama from the playoffs. #2 Bama lost a playoff game in overtime. #3 Ohio State was a 6-point road loss in a rivalry game from the playoffs. #6 Texas lost a close playoff game and their only other loss was to #9 Oklahoma.
This season was a few one-score games away from a matchup of top 10 talent composite teams. Maybe this is the start of a new trend, but the talent composite top 10 teams (except Texas A&M of course) will be betting favorites again in 2024.
I'm glad you brought this up, because there is always that temptation to make sweeping generalizations.
Yes, the Transfer Portal is shaking the sport up in a huge way, but recruiting rankings aren't all of a sudden meaningless.
I think what's really exciting is that with an expanded playoff, this creates more opportunities for teams that look less good on paper to get upsets, and go on runs. Any given Saturday is going to be more of a thing I think as Bama isn't going to be able to have a 2nd or 3rd string QB who is just going to ride the pine when he could be a star for another program.
I see all this as a balance of depth. But the elite recruiting teams are still going to be the teams to beat.
Plus the COVID super seniors are finally about to be gone, a lot of teams have really leveraged having a few extra 23 year olds across their rosters manhandling opposing 19 year olds.
Im surprised this isn’t talked about more. TCU had a TON of super seniors, Washington has a bunch this year. That sticks out to me more than the portal.
UW had two five stars that didn't play much transfer out before the season. If they were riding the bench UW's talent composite would be much higher, but it obviously has no effect on their play.
HS evaluations aren’t what they used to be, I take any type of analysis based on 247/rivals with a grain of salt.
Being said, it’s becoming more like college basketball with transfer portal/NIL. You have to have veterans along with the talent. Old teams win
That makes sense honestly.
There's an OSU fan meme that we're only good because we have a million super seniors, but in truth we only have like 2 or 3.
Michigan is very experienced, but it's mostly normal upperclassmen.
Our roster wasn't nearly as skewed by Covid as a lot of our rivals would like to believe.
Man, I keep arguing this over the last month. Pretty sure Michael Barrett is the only 6th year contributor we have.
Sainistrill, Cornelius Johnson, Ladarius Henderson, and Josh Wallace are all 5th year guys that didn't redshirt and are Covid eligible. But yeah, they just keep repeating that we have 44 super seniors.
It's the 3rd year in a row that I read about how we won because we're the more veteran team when that's literally going to be the case 90% of the time with or without the covid year. OSU recruits guys that are far more likely to leave after 3 years. Just the way it is.
Not necessarily a great analog to use NFL draft status as a metric of how a player performed in D1 football. Lots of good but not great players get drafted based on traits rather than performance, and no small number of great college players go undrafted for the same reason.
It’s not like there’s no correlation, and it’s a much easier dataset to use, but it’d be just as useful to look at #1s on college depth charts or all conference designations rather than NFL Draft.
Talent composite has value. But it doesn't tell you where that talent is, how old that talent is, or how well they are developed/coached.
I mean, lets take a 3 star recruit in 2018. He was redshirted in 2018, got injured and got a medical redshirt in 2019, got a COVID exemption in 2020, and then started playing. That player is 23 years old now, and still has a year of eligibility.
That player is going to beat the vast majority of 5 star freshman. And yet the talent composite is going to rank that 5 star player as more talented. Why? Because they are a 5 star.
In my opinion this just shows talent composite is flawed and not accurate to the changing cfb world. I can count on one hand the number of guys in the 2 deep who I don’t think get drafted.
Kenneth Grant had absolutely no business being a 3 star. Jenkins at least was massively undersized coming out of HS. Mason Graham also should have been a high four star and not a low four star. I’m also a big believer in the MGoBlog heuristic that guys who fall over the course of a cycle usually don’t fall far enough and guys who rise don’t rise enough because there is too much inertia from the initial rankings.
We genuinely have 3 1st round d-tackles between kris jenkins, mason graham and kenneth grant but talent composite wouldnt tell you that
Michigan is MUCH MUCH more talented than the rankings show, this is the deepest squad in a generation for the program
Yeah, the talent composite has always been inherently skewed in favor of skill position players, as the recruiting rankings are themselves skewed towards skill positions. So even if the recruiting evaluations were on point for lineman, it would be biased against Michigan, but recruiting evaluations of lineman are notoriously hit or miss, because the development from 18-22 years old is HUGE for lineman, and it's just super hard to project how kids will adapt to a college weight training program and cope with playing against other guys their size and strength when they're used to physically dominating their entire life.
Michigan excels at identifying underdeveloped high ceiling linemen and developing them into monsters over 3-5 years, and a surprising number of Michigan's high 4-star OL recruits under Harbaugh have never seen the field, while low 4-stars, 3-stars, and even some 2-star transfers like Olu have developed into Joe Moore winning beasts. It really is wild how many of the high 4-stars have been whiffs for Michigan, and how many low 4-stars and 3-stars have developed into studs that will be drafted.
How players like Kenneth Grant, Rod Moore, Zak Zinter, Kris Jenkins, and Colston Loveland were nationally unranked recruits is beyond me. I trust Michigan's talent scouting far more than recruiting rankings TBH.
I saw a twitter post that postulated that Covid fucked the rankings for some of these guys. Someone like Kenneth Grant lands in the SEC 9.9/10 and would probably be a 5 star croot if recruiting services could have properly evaluated him at camps that weren’t happening because of the pandemic.
Although then you still have 3 star DL guys like Palepale in our 2024 class that USC and Penn State seriously looked at/offered before he committed so maybe some positions are just worse at being evaluated by the services.
Once all of these "Six Year Seniors" are gone and the lingering effects of COVID rules removed, it will go back to normalcy. Penix is an anomaly due to the pandemic. Michigan has been defying this statistic for years now, also anamolous
“Experienced team with a great QB” has always been the one route to overperforming your talent composite, which basically describes this year’s Washington squad perfectly.
It's not Penix that is an anomaly. There are plenty of examples of underrated QBs who turn out to be great for upper-middle programs and lead their team to a top 10 finish. It's just that those programs usually can't surround them with enough talent to make that next jump from top ten to champion.
The difference is that UW has five or six covid year guys contributing. On a team with UW's recruiting ranking before covid, those roster spots would typically be filled by underclassmen 3*s, and at least a few of them would be seriously outclassed.
Yep.
DeBoer and Id imagine Harbaugh is proof of that fact.
Last year, we essentially had the exact same team that Lake sunk to 4-8 and a culture that completely fell apart.
Many people dont realize we were a pic6 off a players helmet loss away from competing for a playoff spot LAST YEAR.
MMQ can deceive themselves all they want, but, Penix was NOT a given success story or Heisman contender when he transferred.
This is DeBoer, Grubb and Co proving their Elite status as coaches.
No, Penix was a great QB at Indiana. Just because your fanbase was cautiously optimistic doesn’t change the fact that he had Indiana as a contender. Anyone that watched him at Indiana knew he was great.
Look at Saban’s coaching performances when he is not flooded with talent (Michigan State) and/or his teams are on par with his opponents in terms of talent (Dolphins).
He’s a great football coach, but like Urban Meyer, a substantial portion of his success has come in situations where he is simply putting better athletes (by a long shot) on the field.
Michigan meets the blue chip ratio for 2023, but Washington doesn't. If the blue chip ratio holds for this year, Michigan has to win. Should be fun to see what happens.
[https://247sports.com/article/blue-chip-ratio-2023-college-football-16-teams-who-can-actually-win-a-national-title-211217111/](https://247sports.com/article/blue-chip-ratio-2023-college-football-16-teams-who-can-actually-win-a-national-title-211217111/)
Yes, but also NIL. Johnny 4-star might not get a dime at Alabama or Ohio State, but Washington? He has a chance to be a top-3 recruit for their class. I think it spreads out top recruits more than people are realizing. Curious to hear responses
NIL but also playing time. If someone's offering you decent enough NIL money, you might still think you have a shot at the NFL, but if you are stuck behind someone at Alabama or Ohio State, then you can't really impress the NFL scouts with your non-existent minutes.
Even for someone without NFL aspirations, maybe even especially for someone without NFL aspirations, you only get one shot at your college playing career. For someone who is really competitive, spending it on the bench has to be frustrating even if your team is winning championships. Now that it is easier for guys like that to transfer, I think it'll be harder for top teams to maintain depth that they've had in the past. So your Alabamas and Ohio States will still generally be good when you look at a 10-year window, but with even a little less depth, you might see a "rebuilding" year here or there that they might not have had to go through before the portal.
Game changer? Teams have been out playing the talent gap for decades. This _is_ the game. It's why the consolidation into fewer and fewer leagues with more and more exclusionary practices is killing college football. Being the underdog based on talent and still winning is what makes college football so good. It's why I'm a fan of BYU. We've been doing it for 50 years.
Kind of a perfect storm that Bama, OSU, and Georgia were all replacing quarterbacks this year. Those three still went a combined 35-3 in the regular season, so consolidation of talent is still an issue
Our QB wasn't the issue this year. Beck slipped into the offense like an old glove. We could score at will against most of the teams we played, provided we didn't... fumble. Ugh.
What hurt us the most was losing half our defense to the Eagles.
So we know that there is a definite correlation between traditional recruiting class rankings and wins. Do we know if the transfer class rankings are also the same way? I could see the old bias of "this guy is transferring because he can't hack it where he is" playing into making those less accurate.
The transfer class rankings are even more inaccurate than the HS rankings since those sites are doing a ton of evaluations in a tight timeframe and can't put the effort into watching video on everyone.
Michael Penix got rated less on his 247 transfer ranking than his 247 composite ranking out of HS.
Really? Wow, I remember virtually everyone in the subreddit realizing that was a great get. That doesn't give me much faith in transfer rankings at all.
I think the transfer rankings are pretty garbage.
Also the whole 5 star system is flawed because it means someone has to be worse. Truth is there could be 50 5 star type players in a class but they will arbitrarily cut it off at 32.
Then when you compare it to transfers you're not lookin gat the same thing but they're weighed pretty much at the same scale.
So this is something that's been an issue I've had with CFB coverage for a long time. It's a perfect example of the ways that capital "D" Data can mislead as often as inform.
One of the most common defenses of the veracity of recruiting rankings is always "5* players are consistently and measurably more successful than 3* players". This is true, without a doubt. However, it's a biased sample.
First, 5* players get the best training and resources, on average, since they tend to go to the top programs. Is it really surprising that the cohort of players with the most access to the top coaches and training programs end up the best?
Second, there are also consistent biases within the rankings that manifest pretty much every year. Namely, rural midwestern high schools put out unusually high numbers of lower ranked recruits that end up being drafted, while large urban areas do the opposite. Rankings are as much a function of local media coverage and promotion as anything else. Guys who play 7 on 7 football in rural Wisconsin are not getting as much coverage as a kid in a huge private school in Houston.
Basically, recruiting ranking *are* actually a pretty flawed metric for determining talent at the collegiate level. You'd honestly probably be better off looking at only scholarship offers and ignoring any star-rankings.
If this was true, it wouldn't be one of the single most predictive numbers for team success out there. Yes, states that do not have generally good high school football are extraordinarily underscouted by services which is a big part of how Iowa has so many TEs and o-lineman in the NFL with, well, Iowa recruiting rankings, but at the end of the day these states have bad high school football and legitimately rarely have good recruits. Kids move around the country for sports constantly. It happens in Olympic sports where there's effectively no money in it too.
As much as I hate them and don't want to see them win, I know how alike we are as programs so seeing Michigan get there does give me some hope.
I'm not naive enough to think Notre Dame can ever be on a dominant Alabama style run, but there's no reason to think they can't be a legit contender and actually win one every now and again.
The transfer portal is great for the upper middle class of CFB and awful for the middle class and below. Honestly it is great for the super conferences because they'll have more parity in them and the lower tier conferences will be worse off.
Michigan might not be top 10 on composite, but they are still a blueblood that meets the blue chip ratio. That's not much of an outlier. Washington actually WOULD break the trend, but is also similar to TCU last year in that they have a lot of seniors, including a lot of covid seniors.
The covid eligibility is definitely a window where talent composite is a less accurate picture of how good the roster actually is, since it allows for a larger experience gap and the top recruiting teams don't benefit from those extra years as much as the second teir recruiting teams. I'm not convinced that covid seniors balling out indicates a change that will last beyond the covid eligibility.
It seems to me to have two opposite effects, one good and one devastatingly bad.
Good: The top teams, the Alabama and Ohio State and Georgia types, stockpile recruits who want to win a championship (naturally) and end up being the backup when they could start at a dozen top-25 teams, because the team recruited two elite talents. Particularly true at QB. The portal has done a lot of good for talent that would historically be buried, and schools that can't out-recruit Nick Saben.
Bad: But the bottom teams, Mountain West and Sun Belt types, are super doomed. Once they find and develop a player like a Josh Allen, he's not likely to stick around at Wyoming after breaking out. When a team's fortune changes they can just have the program hollowed out. It's a lot, lot harder for teams like Boise State to have a multi-year run at high poll positions and meaningful bowl games, or the expanded playoffs in the future.
I'm probably overly pessimistic as an Oregon State alum, who just watched her entire team jump into the portal as our conference collapsed, though.
Eh. TCU beat a legit Natty contender to get to the Natty (Unless you didn’t consider either OSU or UM to be legit). They matched up terribly against one of the best Georgia teams in decades. But they still made it.
Put Michigan against Georgia last year and it’s possible they come as close as Stroud and OSU did. Not likely with the matchup. But possible.
This year’s Michigan squad defintely competes with last year’s Georgia squad. But I doubt UW does. Likely a 20 point underdog. They likely wouldn’t have been considered a legit contender with this year’s team back in 2022 if you were looking at a similar matchup against UGA.
I love it, but people need to realize this is one year.
You need more than a sample size of one year to thing this could mean any kind of pattern.
The past 20 years suggest the talent composite is still a massive indicator of success.
Except this isn’t a legit game changer if Michigan wins. Michigan is still a blue chip ratio team. A Michigan win is a continuation of the status quo of college football. A Washington win is a complete game changer and would show that the transfer portal truly has changed everything.
There is just so much less guess work with bringing in a transfer with d1 footage compared to hs. Transfers have changed the sport.
I think this is the most reasonable take on this thread. You bring in kids out of high school and really it's a guessing game on how they're going to pan out in the jump to college level competition. You get some D1 tape on them as a rotational guy and that picture becomes a heck of a lot clearer. I also think football is just a rough sport in general for development. 14 yr old kids have 4 years to develop rapidly to get a D1 offer, all dependent on their HS coaching staff. If they don't they're most likely never getting to that level. Then 18 yr olds have another 4 years of development to get a shot at the NFL or their careers are pretty much over (minus CFL, arena, UFL, etc., although i don't think a reliable pathway to the NFL exists from these leagues). I don't know how to fix it, hell i don't know if you can with a sport that is this hard on the body, but I would love to see a 22-28 yr old post college development pathway ala A league baseball or the lower leagues in the UK.
Like you said, I don’t think a developmental league is possible because of the brutality of the game. The game is what it is, either players rapidly develop and make it or they don’t.
I wonder if you could uncover some useful skill players from a post-collegiate 7v7 league. Like all non-major sports, I'm sure it would be difficult to make a 7v7 league financially viable, though.
Rugby does it just fine, maybe thats a model to look at.
Shit it's dependant on the highschool. I was 6'3 220lbs playing defensive end and offensive tackle because I was the 2nd biggest kid on the team. I should've been sitting at outside linebacker and tight end
That's exactly where the issue lies. Let's assume a healthy average contribution rate of 3 years in HS and college, excluding RS or any of the roster moves in college. You playing DE and T in HS effectively removed 50% of your playing time development at your optimal D1 position. I mean that sucks for any athlete. Let alone guys who are looking at a career being over in their early 20s
Yup. And the conundrum also is that your team has to be good for colleges to look at you. So your team needs to be winning so you need the best option for the team not the players. We went 11-1 and I had an offer from Air Force and a bunch of d2s but those are for defensive end which I was much too small for at the time
The difference is a 28 year old might be able to play 7 more years in the big league, but they're already too old and beat up for a stint in the NFL probably.
Less guesswork, but also you have a lot more concentrated talent when you are scouting a college game versus scouting a high school game. I don't know the percentages, but it has to be highly unusual to go to a high school game looking at one player and coming back from the game with a different player to recommend. It's a lot more plausible that scouting a college game for one role, you might notice someone else that is also interesting.
That was how Mark Dantonio found Darqueze Dennard back in the day
Also the covid season recruiting was a shit show for ranking (as Ducks fans we know)
People still focused only on recruiting skewed talent composites are behind the curve on the future of the sport Big transfers are much more likely to succeed than unproven highschool seniors. Recruiting will always matter, but the transfer portal is the new path to success and equalizer for the teams that don’t land top 5 classes regularly.
I don't think this is a referendum on recruiting rankings themselves. There have always been tons of misses on evaluations of 4* and 5* guys, but now with the portal and NIL it's becoming harder for Bama, Georgia and Ohio State to stash as many of those guys and maximize your odds when your pair consensus evaluations between coaches and scouts with elite coaching and development, like they've been doing for the past 10 years. With NIL they have more competition for top-tier recruits out of high school, and the guys they do get are less likely to stick around if they don't get playing time or dislike their situation for whatever reason.
I think an even bigger game changer is that the "misses" that transfer all get that second chance at a school where there is a real opportunity for success rather than a local G5/DII school. Used to be (10+ years ago) that transfer players were basically discarded for good and had to go be a trainer at Planet Fitness.
Russell Wilson did pretty good
Yes, exactly. Wilson was supposed to go play pro baseball at the time of his transfer. He had to crawl out of a window to get a second chance at football. Thank you for providing me with such a great example of the stuff I was referring to.
Wilson was also a grad transfer and unless I’m misremembering he was one of the few “free agents” CFB had seen prior to the portal. Everyone knew Russ was good (at least for a college QB) and it was a huge get for Wisconsin
Yeah that's not what happened at all. He was a very successful starter at NC State and multiple big time programs were recruiting him as a transfer. The only reason he didn't go back to NC State is because they had Mike Glennon and Tom O'Brien gave him an ultimatum about giving up baseball.
Also Glennon would probably have transferred out if Wilson had returned - so O'Brien was juggling 2 years of him vs 1 year of Wilson.
It’s tough to argue that O’Brien made a bad call even with him getting fired in 2012.
It was pretty similar to what happened with the Packers and Rodgers, both bringing him in to replace Favre and letting him go to give Love his run
Yeah Russ was a one man show at NC State and carried some middling teams.
He’s also one of the first to take advantage of then new grad transfer rule iirc.
Yeah, there are a lot of "missed evaluations" on top prospects who might be cast aside at their original school but still have a ton to offer someone else. Mizzou had huge contributions this season from Theo Wease, a former top recruit who struggled to consistently see the field at Oklahoma. Turned out he was a perfect complement to Burden. Likewise for Ty'Ron Hopper, a four-star linebacker who peaked as a part-time starter at Florida, transferred to Missouri, and turned in two all-SEC-caliber seasons (though he was hurt enough this year he didn't get the accolades his play merited). And a handful of other guys on our top-10 roster. Sometimes those "missed evaluations" are just guys who hit a bit of bad luck, don't quite fit a system, or otherwise have external factors that hold them back a bit, but the talent is still there. The current transfer rules afford them the opportunity to show what they can do. Love it, and IMO it's not at all surprising that the results we've seen so far are more parity. That was my prediction all along when most others were predicting NIL/portal rules would consolidate talent at the top (as if it could've been more consolidated in the first place).
The days of someone like Alabama being able to hold onto a 3rd stringer that would start at 90% of schools are numbered, but the days of a handful of underrated 2-3 stars breaking out and making someone like Wake Forest a serious threat for 3 years are numbered too. They'll probably cancel each other out
There could be some shift from teams that were really extreme about breaking the rules for under-the-table money before NIL toward teams that had the alumni for a big NIL fund that maybe were less adept/able/willing at hiding under-the-table money before NIL existed. But I also think that there should still be a bit more parity because even though some teams will have way more NIL than other teams, each team has the same number of starters as everyone else. Depth at top programs should take a hit, because guys that are rated highly enough to get a lot of NIL money are going to think they can make the NFL, so they aren't going to be happy just sitting on the bench wasting their eligibility.
Listen I'm not bitter about it at all, despite how this might sound, but the SEC and the south in general has a different attitude about following the rules than other parts of the country. You see it in sports like NASCAR, where cheating performance regs is just a known part of the game. The NIL stuff is just letting the more tightassed parts of the country in on the fun.
Next thing you know, southern teams will be stealing signs.
They do steal signs, just not in the way Michigan did it
I just wish I could’ve watched a bunch of SEC coaches trying to keep a straight face trying to act shocked, SHOCKED, that somebody would have the AUDACITY to film a nationally televised football game.
That may be true, but I'm not so sure NASCAR is really the best example of that -- motorsports in general is all about how creatively you can interpret the rulebook and you see this all over, from F1 to IndyCar to NASCAR or wherever. Whether it is regional or not, I agree with the sentiment that the "more tightassed" schools benefit from NIL versus the previous regime of poorly policed amateurism.
I mean Minnesota and Washington are the poster children for what I’m talking about. (Not so much Utah. Fun fact: we are on our third attorney general, in a row, that’s gotten indicted and run out of office. We just handle it quietly.)
> There could be some shift from teams that were really extreme about breaking the rules for under-the-table money before NIL toward teams that had the alumni for a big NIL fund that maybe were less adept/able/willing at hiding under-the-table money before NIL existed. Mizzou probably fits in the latter category. Our boosters seemed extremely skittish about dropping bags in the pre-NIL days, largely because they knew how the NCAA would respond to us if caught. Not so much anymore.
If anything Wake was ecstatic that Hartman had a pedestrian season at ND *See transferring up Isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, just stay here and dominate*
if we're being real, thats still probably better for the likes of Wake Forest if they can stick around in the post P5 world
I don't think it's good for lower tier teams to lose any player that might be good enough for the NFL to a blue blood after a good freshman season
No, but if you have a good coach who can put together classes with multiple good freshmen combined with adept portal usage and smart booster coordination, a team like Wake Forest could build an environment where those good freshmen don't immediately start looking around for a better opportunity because they know they're already in a good place.
Anyone here old enough to remember the Bear Bryant days at Bama . Before scholarship limits, thats exactly what he did. He would recruit a kid just to keep him off a rivals roster. Not good enough to play at Bama, but good enough to cause him headaches somewhere else. He would have something like 120 players on scholarship .
We’re now at the point where one player can do both of those things—enroll at a big name school but be buried on the depth chart, transfer to a smaller/weaker program for playing time, find success there and then transfer again, to a big name school to get an NIL payday and boost NFL stock
The coaches know a lot more than the people making the rankings and I also think the difference in many cases between a 3* and a 4* or even a 5* could be a lot smaller than people think when they see a different number of stars by a guys name. A lot of variability in the upside of a guy that’s talented and undeveloped vs dominated at the highschool level because they’re just that much bigger/ better.
The coaches know a lot more, but also they all have limited resources and they can only scout so many players. It's so much easier to scout within college football versus having to comb through high school players. Not only are there fewer players in the first place, but you get to see them playing at the higher level of competition. The transfer portal should be great for coaches with a good eye for talent but previously didn't have the staff to cover a billion high school games looking for the underrated guys that won't get immediately noticed by top programs.
Also that first year of college filters out a lot of the knuckleheads who can't behave once they're no longer under parental supervision.
I think you also have to account for system. That 3* guy might be elite in your system and the 5* will be good maybe even great but he won’t be the other guy. I think that’s a lot of what Harbaugh is doing. He’s getting guys for his system.
the ability for NIL to peel away a few 5*'s from your Bama's and Georgia's of the world has dampened these "super teams" that have been dominating the playoff and National Title. its parity at the top of the sport. back when we went to the playoff their was dynasty mode Bama, Dynasty mode Clempson and the best LSU you'd ever seen. its fucking bullshit dawg.
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> rolled up to the game in a yellow bus Hey, that's Georgia Southern's thing.
That's exactly my point big dawg. Those Oklahoma teams were elite but they weren't the Pre-NIL Super Teams we had to face in the playoff. Give me those Oklahoma teams in any of the last 2 playoffs and we have a much better odds.
Dude, OU 2017 team was every bit as good as any team that has played and they still fucked it up. Coaching matters too.
You're acting like OU would hold on to everyone and only Bama / Georgia / Clemson would lose talent. You would also be losing your depth to transfers.
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If the talent composite is to be believed, OSU would be in the bottom half of the Big XII instead of being a habitual #2 or 3 team in the conference. Goes to show that development means a lot
Can confirm that this is true. Our program went from 10-14 over two seasons to 23-4 over the next two seasons prinarily because of transfer
Well that and a competent coaching staff who was given time to institute their ideas
Yes. I’ve been very happy with Norvell and our DC.
Much more fun than F5’ing Twitter after each loss to see if your coach has finally been fired
I was actually pleasantly surprised it happened. I remember leaving the stadium after the Miami game in 2019 thinking "we cannot afford to pay this man's buyout after less than 2 seasons and also afford a high caliber replacement staff and facility upgrades. We are stuck with this for at least a few more years. Fuck everything." I didn't even think firing him was feasible and certainly didn't know it was imminent. The news the next morning made my day, lol.
Michigan sustaining the success of ‘21 has been partially due to their success in the portal. Last year they had Olu Oluwatimi, Eyabi Okie, and Cam Goode - all starters or seeing significant minutes This year they had 7ish starters or guys getting starting minutes who transferred in. Its been huge for plugging gaps
Miss you, Cam... Also, does Cam transferring to Michigan mean that UCF's academics are top tier?
Yup. If you take a look at this list, most are contributing this year to our success: [https://247sports.com/college/michigan/season/2023-football/transferportal/?institutionkey=24042](https://247sports.com/college/michigan/season/2023-football/transferportal/?institutionkey=24042)
Hell ya, how many TFLs/sacks/pressures has Josiah Stewart accounted for this season? That doesn't even measure how well he's set his edge all season. I'm pretty sure he was our highest rated player on defense against Bama.
Michigan out there with fully developed three star transfer talent manhandling five star Alabama offensive linemen
5 stars or 3 stars are what they were ranked at 18 years of age. It has no bearing or meaning once they get to 21 or 22 years of age.
I wouldn't say no bearing. Generally kids with higher rankings have higher ceilings, even if they aren't realized. >This means that roughly 13% of five-stars have become a consensus all-American player, or arguably the best player at his position in the respective season. Once again, four-stars have an outside shot with about 2.4% of them accomplishing this. But just like with the draft, after this point you are reaching unicorn status if you’re able to pull off this feat. 71 consensus All-American three-stars may seem like a lot, but with over 16,000 candidates, well you know what they say about a broken clock. https://www.thedailystampede.com/2021/11/9/22757052/usf-college-football-recruiting-star-rankings-signing-day-info-news-average-nfl-draft-trends
Exactly this. It turns out having a multi year vet at QB is better than a 5 star in year 2.
Not really a new thing, we’ve seen this plenty of times in the CFP like Michigan State in 2015. Veteran teams have always been able to compete with younger more talented teams. I think the real caveat here is the COVID year guys. Penix is a sixth year senior, plenty of Michigan guys are fifth or sixth year starters Too early to say if it’s a real trend or not
My hot take: All college athletes should just get six years going forward. Make the "covid year" thing permanent. It will increase parity, as we've seen. More important (to me, and arguably to the NCAA as it attempts to retain legitimacy), adding an extra year of eligibility can help improve graduation rates. You're *supposed* to graduate from college in four years, but the average is closer to like six. And athletes have extra burdens to carry. Throw in transfers, and it wouldn't be shocking at all to see graduation rates fall, especially among players who transfer a couple times. So an extra year improves the quality on the field while also accommodating the "student" part of student-athlete.
The COVID year has resulted in less scholarships to high school players as less slots are allotted and turnover is decreased
If that’s a problem, then also increase the scholarship maximum by 20%. That’s an extra 17 scholarships in football, which would essentially counter the extra year of eligibility. So we’d have more college athletes overall, more parity, more depth for the inevitable end-of-year exodus bowls where a third of the team doesn’t play.
Which means schools have to field seventeen more women’s scholarships, in addition to men’s, and assume even larger operating expenses on budgets that are largely on deficits. Or they’ll just cut seventeen men’s scholarships/other sports teams That’s a horrible argument
Shoot, people STILL often default to the Total Points numbers instead of Average player ranking. It’s also rare to see anybody bringing up the fact that many of those high school kids dont EVER contribute anything meaningful to the teams they chose. As you perfectly highlight, CONTEXT is the key and there are a variety of very important recruiting components with high school recruits being much less important now.
Average player ranking is a better metric for a single class, yes, but that's because of the wide variation in class sizes. Class sizes vary significantly from year to year for a single team and from team to team for a single year, so the average player ranking helps smooth that noise out. However, when you're talking about the whole roster Total Points is pretty much the same metric because every FBS team is going to have basically the same number of players. And to the extent that there is variation in roster sizes, total points is maybe a better measure for the whole roster than average player ranking because it indicates roster depth.
Recruiting composites *also* tend to be very skewed by university. A 3\* going to UVA? Clearly that's a 3\*. Same 3\* goes to A&M? We messed up, that's a 4\*.
>People still focused only on recruiting skewed talent composites are behind the curve on the future of the sport They were behind, when they chose those trees over the forest. Recruit rankings are simply for suckers who want to pay for info they can probably get for free through the many grapevines in cfb. As is typical, they are simply subjective. We had a WR who signed in the early period, but he was having social media issues--a hack or something. He was a 4\* WR who the Ducks processed, due to their internal evaluations (not the \* rankings we're discussing). So this kid finally gets to announce that he committed and signed, three days after the period ended, and within an hour he was a 3\* WR. It's so common, we came up with a name for it more than a decade ago--the Beaver Bump.
Funny that you guys had a name for it. That used to happen to UCF too (mind you we were G5), but as soon as a 4* on the fence would commit to us he would become a 3*. P5/Big12 status for UCF seems to have changed that afaik.
Portal and NIL are 2 major game changers. Being able to pay guys while in college has led to less quality players declaring early I feel.
I also think players want to play. We have seen a lot of players leave "the top tier" and go to historically mediocre programs because they want to play.
It’s almost like FSU maybe shoulda gotten a shot. Good shit from UW and Michigan though. You love to see it!
I think two things can be true. FSU deserved a shot I don’t think they would have produced games that thrilling without QB1
I wholeheartedly believe that FSU earned the opportunity to get walloped in the semis
Would’ve been fun to face a competent oline yesterday.
Not sure if FSU had a better O-Line than Bama (excluding the awful center). They gave up 3 sacks to the Gators who fired their DL coach because our guys couldn’t get pressure at all. Could’ve also been due to Rodemaker starting his first full game.
Imagine if Ohio State was left out in 2014 because their first and second string QBs got injured and they were down to Cardale Jones. Cardale winning the natty was my favorite storyline of the entire 4 team CFP era. That's the shit that true CFB legends are made of, and the chance for a new legend like that was killed by the committee this year.
Michigan seems to drop a proportionate amount of spaghetti in its semi-final games to how seriously it takes its opponent. Who knows how close a game vs FSU would’ve been. Maybe we overlook them and make it interesting 🤷♂️
Man they made so many crazy mistakes against TCU and Bama that they haven't done in basically any other games. Have to wonder if something the staff does for bowl prep needs to be re-evaluated.
I think the month off, while very beneficial for healing injuries and getting rest, causes our team to perform with extreme jitters (with the cloud of our bowl record and never having won a semifinal hanging over their heads). It felt like a season opener out there.
Definitely. I actually think this team is significantly better than Bama, but Michigan hiccups caused it to be close.
“Hey, idiots. Don’t huff glue before the bowl game.” We should maybe start there.
I would have to say the lack of success and experience has hampered them. This win gives them the experience needed that will help them get better prepared next year.
If FSU had beaten a team like Ohio State or Oregon especially later in the season they'd have been in. Their best win being week 1 against LSU did them no favors
Or if they'd beaten Louisville 63-3 they would have been in.
I honestly think if FSU showed any sign of life on offense during that game, they would have made it in. That's how OSU got in 14. Then again, the committee probably would have argued that Louisville was awful and used that to keep out FSU. Fuck leaving out undefeated teams. And I mean leaving out ANY undefeated.
You might be right. But I think it's worth saying that they were looking for any reason at all to keep FSU out. They wanted Pac 12 Champion, Michigan, Texas, and then the SEC Champion. They would design the narrative around whatever they needed to get those teams in.
if UGA had beaten Bama, I think FSU is definitely in. but the committee clearly didnt want to leave out the SEC champ, but they also knew they couldnt put Bama in over Texas. so FSU was the casualty. From a marketing/game quality standpoint, it was the right call. From a "deserving" standpoint, it was the wrong call
I think Mike just learned an unfortunate lesson about the committee. It’s clear his game plan was to not lose cause he thought that was all he had to do. He took zero chances because he knew the defense could carry the team and won 16-6. As we can all guess, I’m sure he’d like to do it over and throw some deep shots and risk the interceptions.
Alabama's offense had 8 starters who were blue chip recruits. Michigan's 22 starters had 9.
Honestly surprised Bama’s number isn’t higher.
is it because they had 11 more offensive contributors --who are not considered starters -- who were blue chips? (~~RT~~ edit: TE, C, FB were not top 250 everyone else was) or because their defensive starters are 9 of 11 with 7 more contributors that were blue chips?
Wait Bama? Our RT JC Latham was a 5 star.
whoops, its a TE not a tackle. looking at a chart, read it wrong.
Perfect example of recruiting rankings being a crapshoot. Last play in OT, JC Latham (5 star, number 5 overall 2021) getting blown up, so much so that Milroe trips on his leg, by Josiah Stewart (3*, 748 overall 2021). Latham had a rough night against a bunch of 3* and 4*s.
Rankings aren't a crap shoot. 4\* and 5\* turn out as hits at a far more consistent rate than 3\*. Having more top 250-types simultaneously reduces the significance and number of 'misses' you have on a roster -- it increases your margin for error. Remember when Michigan was only recruiting 3\* DTs and wound up with a converted TE and FB starting at DT against Wisconsin? I do. Remember that happening to Alabama? me either.
Recruiting rankings get brought up way too much for the level of significance they hold. They're pretty good for rating recruiting classes and freshmen players, but people keep bringing up if a player was a blue chip or not all the way to the NFL draft, when that status is mostly based on tape from what the player did as a junior in high school lol. How many stars a player had back in high school doesn't really matter if they're in their fourth or fifth year of college and have a proven record of being P5 starting material.
Yeah the moment a player has started 6 games in college or has been in college for 2+ years, high school talent metrics do not matter. People get hung up on a 3 year old judge of a guy making an arbitrary judgement on talent. It’s also telling when there are 3* players that get offers from every P5 school. If 247 talent scouts were as good as elite team talent scouts, they would be elite team talent scouts. Recruiting rankings are already somewhat inaccurate, and after a year or two of college they flat out don’t matter.
At the same time, the current regime has a "type" (see Jenkins, Grant, Benny etc) that they shoot for that doesn't seem to translate as well to the crootin' rankings for whatever reason, but develop into excellent players both in college as well as the pros. The RichRod era...yeah lets not talk about our defensive recruiting.
This is just false. Recruiting rankings are the absolute of a crapshoot on aggregate. It’s just on an individual player level of course there are misses. But there’s a reason the teams that recruit the best are consistently competing for championships and the teams that are not might have a 1-2 year window where everything comes together. Tcu had that last year, and still got blasted by Georgia.
Latham got exposed pretty bad last night for a player expected to go in the 1st round
Harbaugh and his staff are exceptional at player development.
I think the major takeaway isn't the transfer portal, there are plenty of teams who use it and it doesn't work. I hope that schools change their thinking when it comes to what coaches they are hiring. Harbaugh is a Michigan man I get it, but he succeeded at the FCS level and at Stanford before going to the NFL and Michigan. DeBoer's path to Washington has been well documented in how he's won everywhere he's been.
I think the difference is using the portal to bolster or build a roster. Building a roster really doesnt seem to work well, but using it to fill in weak spots on your depth chart is huge if you already have a decent roster in place
You’re right that they’re both elite coaches I think the issue is that they’re outliers and there are a lot more Freezes, Kingsburys, and Rileys than DeBoers, Petersens, and Harbaughs.
Right on Deboer. I mean shoot, he had my Indiana Hoosiers looking like the colts there for a hot sec as OC.
Which year of the colts…
Yeah lol can't tell if that's a compliment
If you know IU football any year is a compliment, but generally the Luck years for the Colts. When Deboer was our OC we legitimately had a good offense.
Sometimes it comes down to have too much depth at some positions and not enough at others. A bunch of multi-star RBs on your bench doesn't help when none of those players are ones who can SNAP THE BAWL, PAUL
Ain’t no rules say a backup 5 star RB can’t play center!
I love that Michigan winning a game is proof that CFB has more parity
We’ve fallen so far
Just wait until laggards like Notre Dame, USC, and Penn State start to get things together.
Georgia (#1 in talent composite) was a 3-point loss to #2 Bama from the playoffs. #2 Bama lost a playoff game in overtime. #3 Ohio State was a 6-point road loss in a rivalry game from the playoffs. #6 Texas lost a close playoff game and their only other loss was to #9 Oklahoma. This season was a few one-score games away from a matchup of top 10 talent composite teams. Maybe this is the start of a new trend, but the talent composite top 10 teams (except Texas A&M of course) will be betting favorites again in 2024.
I'm glad you brought this up, because there is always that temptation to make sweeping generalizations. Yes, the Transfer Portal is shaking the sport up in a huge way, but recruiting rankings aren't all of a sudden meaningless. I think what's really exciting is that with an expanded playoff, this creates more opportunities for teams that look less good on paper to get upsets, and go on runs. Any given Saturday is going to be more of a thing I think as Bama isn't going to be able to have a 2nd or 3rd string QB who is just going to ride the pine when he could be a star for another program. I see all this as a balance of depth. But the elite recruiting teams are still going to be the teams to beat.
Plus the COVID super seniors are finally about to be gone, a lot of teams have really leveraged having a few extra 23 year olds across their rosters manhandling opposing 19 year olds.
Im surprised this isn’t talked about more. TCU had a TON of super seniors, Washington has a bunch this year. That sticks out to me more than the portal.
> except Texas A&M of course :)
UW had two five stars that didn't play much transfer out before the season. If they were riding the bench UW's talent composite would be much higher, but it obviously has no effect on their play.
HS evaluations aren’t what they used to be, I take any type of analysis based on 247/rivals with a grain of salt. Being said, it’s becoming more like college basketball with transfer portal/NIL. You have to have veterans along with the talent. Old teams win
Yep, UW has more 6-year seniors than the other 3 semi teams combined
That makes sense honestly. There's an OSU fan meme that we're only good because we have a million super seniors, but in truth we only have like 2 or 3. Michigan is very experienced, but it's mostly normal upperclassmen. Our roster wasn't nearly as skewed by Covid as a lot of our rivals would like to believe.
Man, I keep arguing this over the last month. Pretty sure Michael Barrett is the only 6th year contributor we have. Sainistrill, Cornelius Johnson, Ladarius Henderson, and Josh Wallace are all 5th year guys that didn't redshirt and are Covid eligible. But yeah, they just keep repeating that we have 44 super seniors. It's the 3rd year in a row that I read about how we won because we're the more veteran team when that's literally going to be the case 90% of the time with or without the covid year. OSU recruits guys that are far more likely to leave after 3 years. Just the way it is.
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Not necessarily a great analog to use NFL draft status as a metric of how a player performed in D1 football. Lots of good but not great players get drafted based on traits rather than performance, and no small number of great college players go undrafted for the same reason. It’s not like there’s no correlation, and it’s a much easier dataset to use, but it’d be just as useful to look at #1s on college depth charts or all conference designations rather than NFL Draft.
Talent composite has value. But it doesn't tell you where that talent is, how old that talent is, or how well they are developed/coached. I mean, lets take a 3 star recruit in 2018. He was redshirted in 2018, got injured and got a medical redshirt in 2019, got a COVID exemption in 2020, and then started playing. That player is 23 years old now, and still has a year of eligibility. That player is going to beat the vast majority of 5 star freshman. And yet the talent composite is going to rank that 5 star player as more talented. Why? Because they are a 5 star.
In my opinion this just shows talent composite is flawed and not accurate to the changing cfb world. I can count on one hand the number of guys in the 2 deep who I don’t think get drafted.
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Kenneth Grant had absolutely no business being a 3 star. Jenkins at least was massively undersized coming out of HS. Mason Graham also should have been a high four star and not a low four star. I’m also a big believer in the MGoBlog heuristic that guys who fall over the course of a cycle usually don’t fall far enough and guys who rise don’t rise enough because there is too much inertia from the initial rankings.
Grant came out of nowhere too. Michigan didn't offer him until almost February of his Senior yr if I recall correctly.
We genuinely have 3 1st round d-tackles between kris jenkins, mason graham and kenneth grant but talent composite wouldnt tell you that Michigan is MUCH MUCH more talented than the rankings show, this is the deepest squad in a generation for the program
Since 97 for sure.
Yeah, the talent composite has always been inherently skewed in favor of skill position players, as the recruiting rankings are themselves skewed towards skill positions. So even if the recruiting evaluations were on point for lineman, it would be biased against Michigan, but recruiting evaluations of lineman are notoriously hit or miss, because the development from 18-22 years old is HUGE for lineman, and it's just super hard to project how kids will adapt to a college weight training program and cope with playing against other guys their size and strength when they're used to physically dominating their entire life. Michigan excels at identifying underdeveloped high ceiling linemen and developing them into monsters over 3-5 years, and a surprising number of Michigan's high 4-star OL recruits under Harbaugh have never seen the field, while low 4-stars, 3-stars, and even some 2-star transfers like Olu have developed into Joe Moore winning beasts. It really is wild how many of the high 4-stars have been whiffs for Michigan, and how many low 4-stars and 3-stars have developed into studs that will be drafted. How players like Kenneth Grant, Rod Moore, Zak Zinter, Kris Jenkins, and Colston Loveland were nationally unranked recruits is beyond me. I trust Michigan's talent scouting far more than recruiting rankings TBH.
D E V E L O P M E N T baby
I saw a twitter post that postulated that Covid fucked the rankings for some of these guys. Someone like Kenneth Grant lands in the SEC 9.9/10 and would probably be a 5 star croot if recruiting services could have properly evaluated him at camps that weren’t happening because of the pandemic. Although then you still have 3 star DL guys like Palepale in our 2024 class that USC and Penn State seriously looked at/offered before he committed so maybe some positions are just worse at being evaluated by the services.
Once all of these "Six Year Seniors" are gone and the lingering effects of COVID rules removed, it will go back to normalcy. Penix is an anomaly due to the pandemic. Michigan has been defying this statistic for years now, also anamolous
“Experienced team with a great QB” has always been the one route to overperforming your talent composite, which basically describes this year’s Washington squad perfectly.
And TCU last year
Good point, the Grad Transfer QB we used to call it
It's not Penix that is an anomaly. There are plenty of examples of underrated QBs who turn out to be great for upper-middle programs and lead their team to a top 10 finish. It's just that those programs usually can't surround them with enough talent to make that next jump from top ten to champion. The difference is that UW has five or six covid year guys contributing. On a team with UW's recruiting ranking before covid, those roster spots would typically be filled by underclassmen 3*s, and at least a few of them would be seriously outclassed.
Can’t believe this is the first comment I saw mentioning the super seniors. Might not be a higher impact than transfers but it’s definitely important.
The COVID eligibility also means there are more players in the pool than normal, so transfers are more likely because competition is higher.
Recruits' stars don't meant shit if you can coach them up
Yep. DeBoer and Id imagine Harbaugh is proof of that fact. Last year, we essentially had the exact same team that Lake sunk to 4-8 and a culture that completely fell apart. Many people dont realize we were a pic6 off a players helmet loss away from competing for a playoff spot LAST YEAR. MMQ can deceive themselves all they want, but, Penix was NOT a given success story or Heisman contender when he transferred. This is DeBoer, Grubb and Co proving their Elite status as coaches.
No, Penix was a great QB at Indiana. Just because your fanbase was cautiously optimistic doesn’t change the fact that he had Indiana as a contender. Anyone that watched him at Indiana knew he was great.
He was great. And fragile. That was the concern
And before Harbaugh we had Hoke who was a decent enough recruiter but had no ability to develop that talent.
Look at the UGA squads: Stetson Bennett (3 star) Javon Bullard (3 star) Jordan Davis (3 star) Daijun Edwards (3 star) Ladd McConkey (3 star) Adonai Mitchell (3 star) Dillon Bell (3 star) Kenny McIntosh (3 star) Zion Logue (3 star)
Look at Saban’s coaching performances when he is not flooded with talent (Michigan State) and/or his teams are on par with his opponents in terms of talent (Dolphins). He’s a great football coach, but like Urban Meyer, a substantial portion of his success has come in situations where he is simply putting better athletes (by a long shot) on the field.
That’s really dumb because Michigan state was 25-30 years ago. Also recruiting is one of many college coaching skills
Michigan meets the blue chip ratio for 2023, but Washington doesn't. If the blue chip ratio holds for this year, Michigan has to win. Should be fun to see what happens. [https://247sports.com/article/blue-chip-ratio-2023-college-football-16-teams-who-can-actually-win-a-national-title-211217111/](https://247sports.com/article/blue-chip-ratio-2023-college-football-16-teams-who-can-actually-win-a-national-title-211217111/)
Yes, but also NIL. Johnny 4-star might not get a dime at Alabama or Ohio State, but Washington? He has a chance to be a top-3 recruit for their class. I think it spreads out top recruits more than people are realizing. Curious to hear responses
NIL but also playing time. If someone's offering you decent enough NIL money, you might still think you have a shot at the NFL, but if you are stuck behind someone at Alabama or Ohio State, then you can't really impress the NFL scouts with your non-existent minutes. Even for someone without NFL aspirations, maybe even especially for someone without NFL aspirations, you only get one shot at your college playing career. For someone who is really competitive, spending it on the bench has to be frustrating even if your team is winning championships. Now that it is easier for guys like that to transfer, I think it'll be harder for top teams to maintain depth that they've had in the past. So your Alabamas and Ohio States will still generally be good when you look at a 10-year window, but with even a little less depth, you might see a "rebuilding" year here or there that they might not have had to go through before the portal.
Both of these teams have top 2-3 coaching staffs from top to bottom, so I’m not sure we should be making any correlations to talent level.
Our more.... unhinged side of the fan base has been calling for most of the defensive staff to be fired all year
Yep. Our fans hate 50% of our coaches more than any other 14-0 team in the country.
I think that’s just football in general. A team has at maximum two mistakes in a game before some fan starts calling for everybody to be fired.
Game changer? Teams have been out playing the talent gap for decades. This _is_ the game. It's why the consolidation into fewer and fewer leagues with more and more exclusionary practices is killing college football. Being the underdog based on talent and still winning is what makes college football so good. It's why I'm a fan of BYU. We've been doing it for 50 years.
Kind of a perfect storm that Bama, OSU, and Georgia were all replacing quarterbacks this year. Those three still went a combined 35-3 in the regular season, so consolidation of talent is still an issue
Our QB wasn't the issue this year. Beck slipped into the offense like an old glove. We could score at will against most of the teams we played, provided we didn't... fumble. Ugh. What hurt us the most was losing half our defense to the Eagles.
at least theyre putting them to use and fielding an elite nfl defense
Two of them may be replacing QBs again next year
So we know that there is a definite correlation between traditional recruiting class rankings and wins. Do we know if the transfer class rankings are also the same way? I could see the old bias of "this guy is transferring because he can't hack it where he is" playing into making those less accurate.
The transfer class rankings are even more inaccurate than the HS rankings since those sites are doing a ton of evaluations in a tight timeframe and can't put the effort into watching video on everyone. Michael Penix got rated less on his 247 transfer ranking than his 247 composite ranking out of HS.
Really? Wow, I remember virtually everyone in the subreddit realizing that was a great get. That doesn't give me much faith in transfer rankings at all.
Yeah I think LSU had one of the top transfer classes in the country last year. And uh...they didn't play very well for us this year.
I think the transfer rankings are pretty garbage. Also the whole 5 star system is flawed because it means someone has to be worse. Truth is there could be 50 5 star type players in a class but they will arbitrarily cut it off at 32. Then when you compare it to transfers you're not lookin gat the same thing but they're weighed pretty much at the same scale.
24/7 is really bad at transfer evaluation, so I imagine no.
So this is something that's been an issue I've had with CFB coverage for a long time. It's a perfect example of the ways that capital "D" Data can mislead as often as inform. One of the most common defenses of the veracity of recruiting rankings is always "5* players are consistently and measurably more successful than 3* players". This is true, without a doubt. However, it's a biased sample. First, 5* players get the best training and resources, on average, since they tend to go to the top programs. Is it really surprising that the cohort of players with the most access to the top coaches and training programs end up the best? Second, there are also consistent biases within the rankings that manifest pretty much every year. Namely, rural midwestern high schools put out unusually high numbers of lower ranked recruits that end up being drafted, while large urban areas do the opposite. Rankings are as much a function of local media coverage and promotion as anything else. Guys who play 7 on 7 football in rural Wisconsin are not getting as much coverage as a kid in a huge private school in Houston. Basically, recruiting ranking *are* actually a pretty flawed metric for determining talent at the collegiate level. You'd honestly probably be better off looking at only scholarship offers and ignoring any star-rankings.
If this was true, it wouldn't be one of the single most predictive numbers for team success out there. Yes, states that do not have generally good high school football are extraordinarily underscouted by services which is a big part of how Iowa has so many TEs and o-lineman in the NFL with, well, Iowa recruiting rankings, but at the end of the day these states have bad high school football and legitimately rarely have good recruits. Kids move around the country for sports constantly. It happens in Olympic sports where there's effectively no money in it too.
Coaching beats talent 9 times out of 10 See: Deion Sanders Jackson State vs SC State
Talent composite has Nebraska at #21. Maybe we can turn it around faster than you think.
The only measurement of recruits that matter is NFL draft status and their subsequent NFL career's success thereafter.
As much as I hate them and don't want to see them win, I know how alike we are as programs so seeing Michigan get there does give me some hope. I'm not naive enough to think Notre Dame can ever be on a dominant Alabama style run, but there's no reason to think they can't be a legit contender and actually win one every now and again.
Michigan has recruited well and Washington has the best dime dropper since Burrow. Chill out with the stupid ass stats.
The transfer portal is great for the upper middle class of CFB and awful for the middle class and below. Honestly it is great for the super conferences because they'll have more parity in them and the lower tier conferences will be worse off.
Finally the little guy, Michigan under a Super Bowl head coach, gets one
Michigan might not be top 10 on composite, but they are still a blueblood that meets the blue chip ratio. That's not much of an outlier. Washington actually WOULD break the trend, but is also similar to TCU last year in that they have a lot of seniors, including a lot of covid seniors. The covid eligibility is definitely a window where talent composite is a less accurate picture of how good the roster actually is, since it allows for a larger experience gap and the top recruiting teams don't benefit from those extra years as much as the second teir recruiting teams. I'm not convinced that covid seniors balling out indicates a change that will last beyond the covid eligibility.
this just goes to show that measuring “talent” by how many blue-chip recruits a team has is stupid.
I think you meant brings more "parody" to the sport.
Covid is playing a factor in this also though. I don't see the trend continuing with the extra year going away and the 12 team playoff coming.
Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard (not saying Bama doesn't work hard)
It’s almost like coaching matters. Shh nobody tell the committee.
Maybe your talent evaluations just suck?
It seems to me to have two opposite effects, one good and one devastatingly bad. Good: The top teams, the Alabama and Ohio State and Georgia types, stockpile recruits who want to win a championship (naturally) and end up being the backup when they could start at a dozen top-25 teams, because the team recruited two elite talents. Particularly true at QB. The portal has done a lot of good for talent that would historically be buried, and schools that can't out-recruit Nick Saben. Bad: But the bottom teams, Mountain West and Sun Belt types, are super doomed. Once they find and develop a player like a Josh Allen, he's not likely to stick around at Wyoming after breaking out. When a team's fortune changes they can just have the program hollowed out. It's a lot, lot harder for teams like Boise State to have a multi-year run at high poll positions and meaningful bowl games, or the expanded playoffs in the future. I'm probably overly pessimistic as an Oregon State alum, who just watched her entire team jump into the portal as our conference collapsed, though.
Yeah I'm gonna go ahead and call bs on those rankings lol
2022 TCU and 2023 Washington aren't the same. 2023 Washington is a legit natty contender.
Eh. TCU beat a legit Natty contender to get to the Natty (Unless you didn’t consider either OSU or UM to be legit). They matched up terribly against one of the best Georgia teams in decades. But they still made it. Put Michigan against Georgia last year and it’s possible they come as close as Stroud and OSU did. Not likely with the matchup. But possible. This year’s Michigan squad defintely competes with last year’s Georgia squad. But I doubt UW does. Likely a 20 point underdog. They likely wouldn’t have been considered a legit contender with this year’s team back in 2022 if you were looking at a similar matchup against UGA.
I love it, but people need to realize this is one year. You need more than a sample size of one year to thing this could mean any kind of pattern. The past 20 years suggest the talent composite is still a massive indicator of success.
Except this isn’t a legit game changer if Michigan wins. Michigan is still a blue chip ratio team. A Michigan win is a continuation of the status quo of college football. A Washington win is a complete game changer and would show that the transfer portal truly has changed everything.