Recruiting Ratings and the Draft

I felt like this warranted more than just a comment on the recruiting thread so that's the reason for the new topic. I've had some extra time at work lately and so I've been messing around on Excel. After seeing a lot of the talk about our recent recruiting classes and being unhappy with where things currently seem to stand, I was curious to see what the correlation was, if any, between first round picks in the NFL draft and their ratings coming out of high school. I pulled all of the data from 247 and the ratings are based on the composite rankings.

For the purposes of this, I only looked at players drafted in the first round from 2011-2020. This obviously won't give a comprehensive look at ratings, but first round draft picks should be the best of the best and so I felt as though that was enough for an initial look. I decided I would see what the makeup of picks was, specifically as it related to star rating and composite rating coming out of high school, college, and conference. For the purposes of this exercise I've included Notre Dame as a member of the ACC. Players coming into college without ratings have been given 1 star and a score of 0.65 (2 stars start at 0.70). For the players who went to juco, I've used their 247 scores out of high school.

This spreadsheet is a more user-friendly looking one than what I'd been using to sift through everything:

Some takeaways I have from this exercise:

1. There's a reason that kids choose SEC schools. The SEC more than doubles the amount of players taken in the first round aside from the ACC, who is still distantly behind. Seventeen year old kids want to go pro and dream of being first round picks. Kids pay attention when they see 15 SEC players taken in the first round of the NFL Draft.

2. As you can see on the spreadsheet, the average rating of a first round pick over the past ten years is 0.8939. There's a single Virginia Tech recruit (Alec Bryant) who is over that threshold. There are a few commits who are close, but not there. For comparison with some of our close competition, UVA has three players above that value and UNC has twenty. We also have a pretty low average recruit rating for both of these classes, which most are well aware of. Granted, not all of these recruits will pan out, ratings can still change, and some from the 2021 class may move around, but compared to our close competition we're not looking great at the moment.

3. The 2020 draft had the highest average rating for players taken in the first round. Time will tell whether that was an outlier or if this is the new normal. It'll be interesting to see if this trend holds. It could have something to do with a lack in pro days at schools because of COVID, and teams having to take players that they had already seen perform well consistently over the past few years. It could also mean that less players are slipping through the cracks in high school recruiting as a whole. If that's the case, that trend might continue in the coming years.

4. Almost as many three star players have been taken in the first round over this time period as four star players. At first glance that might seem reassuring, but 37% of recruits are three stars and only 6% are four stars (per 247). That being said, there is a 1-184 chance of a three star player being drafted in the first round, whereas there is a 1-21 chance for a four star recruit (also per 247). This goes to show that recruiting rankings do mean something.

5. When you compare average rating and number of players drafted for each conference, there really isn't much of a trend for the ACC and SEC, but there are trends for the other three conferences (positive for Big 10 and 12, negative for Pac 12). We'll see if these trends continue.

Obviously this doesn't paint the whole picture, but I figured it was a good place to start. We want those four and five star guys to come play in Blacksburg, and as long as they're choosing our opposition over us, we're getting weaker and they're getting stronger.

Feel free to chime in with any critiques or observations of your own. Would be interested to have more of a conversation.

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"Why gobble gobble chumps asks such good questions, I will never know." - TheFifthFuller

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I told him I’d crawl on my hands and knees to be the DL coach at Virginia Tech. Now, all of a sudden, I’m sitting in this chair and I told him I’d still crawl on my hands and knees to work here. I just want to be here.
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