Data Suggests: Pry's first full class raised the recruiting floor

After this week's class, I put together a box plot of VT recruiting classes over the years:

What stood out to me was that Pry is raising the floor:

• The Minimum rated player in this year's class is a 0.8263 - that's the second-highest minimum a VT class has had in the modern recruiting era (the highest was in 2005, where a 0.8400 rated player was the minimum)
• The Lower Quartile (aka, the 25th percentile player rating) for this class is a 0.8547 - This is (coincidently, also) the second-highest lower quartile a VT class has had in the modern recruiting era (the highest was in 2018 - lower quartile was 0.8559).
• Finally, we are seeing a decrease in unranked players. I'm not really sure how to interpret these... more on that below.
  

  Year	Number of unranked players
  2019	1
  2020	3
  2021	3
  2022	0
  2023	1

Some Caveats, and further discussion about the data:

• Data is pulled from 247 - I've read that 247 data before 2005 is not usable, and that it is significantly better around 2011 (I've read some people attribute this to when HUDL started becoming mainstream).
• I used the most recent available rating for players. This is relevant for transfers; some transfers have a transfer rating (which I used if available), other transfers do not (in which case, I used their high school rating).
• On the unranked players....
• The unranked players are all transfers, walk-ons, or special teams players (kickers, punters, etc).
• From 2005-2019, we only offered 1 unranked player according to 247 - my guess is that 247 just didn't track this until recently? Not sure though.
• The unranked players are excluded from the minimums in the charts, but not from the medians or quartiles. Candidly, I couldn't figure out how to get the QUARTILE function in google sheets to ignore unranked players without removing them from the data all together, and I didn't want to do that (yet). After fiddling with it for longer than I'd like to admit, I said, 'Ahh, fuck it,' and just left them in. I'm not sure how this will impact the data, but 3 unranked recruits is >10% of a 20-25 person class - it would probably make those last Fuente classes look better than they actually were.
• Of the 8 unranked players, Changa Hodge was probably the most successful/had the most name recognition (at least to me)
• Khalil Herbert's Transfer rating was a .9000. I don't remember that being a thing at the time.

Finally, this is one year of data. It's obviously too soon to know if this is a trend, but for now, I'm going to slide on my maroon and orange glass, be overly optimistic, and assume that there are more good things coming.