Dave Sez

Dave -- I'm having a hell of a time trying to keep up with the frenzied barrage of excellent posts here recently. Did you get fired? From Pomeroy/RPI to hockey fights, you've covered it all in the last few days.

Not to change the subject or anything, but have you noticed that UVA's recruiting class (FB) is ranked pretty high (#14)? Only ACC school ranked higher? GT at #13. VT, you ask? #20.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/football/ncaa/01/17/recruiting.teamrankings/index.html

Matt wrote:

Dave -- I'm having a hell of a time trying to keep up with the frenzied barrage of excellent posts here recently. Did you get fired? From Pomeroy/RPI to hockey fights, you've covered it all in the last few days.

Shhh, don't tell my wife!

Matt wrote:

Not to change the subject or anything, but have you noticed that UVA's recruiting class (FB) is ranked pretty high (#14)? Only ACC school ranked higher? GT at #13. VT, you ask? #20. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/football/ncaa/01/17/recruiting.teamrankings/index.html

No, I hadn't noticed that. That's very interesting and a little surprising. I get email updates from The Sabre.com, so I knew things were going fairly well, but I didn't realize it was so good relative to the rest of the ACC. Actually, if those numbers hold up, it was a pretty bad year for ACC recruiting!

Dave wrote:

Actually, if those numbers hold up, it was a pretty bad year for ACC recruiting!

I was thinking that myself -- I don't remember exactly where Miami and FSU were, but not top 25. I think what really drove it home for me was NC State's rank. Obviously not a traditional powerhouse, but ranked down at 58, sandwiched between Vandy and UConn....

Well keep in mind that FSU historically lands a bunch of four- and five-star recruits in the last few days of the signing period. I don't know why they do it that way, but it seems to work out for them. Miami might do the same. I'm not sure.

So, with a little further digging, things certainly don't look great for the ACC as a whole. I'm not sure how Rivals calculates the total points for each school, but it seems that a reasonable indicator of the strength of a conference's recruiting might be the average points for the whole conference:

1,345 SEC
889 B12
832 B10
813 P10
782 ACC
515 BE

To me, it looks like the SEC is destroying everyone and the BE is lagging pretty far behind. Given the difference between 1 and 2 and the difference between 5 and 6, I would argue that on the whole, B10, B12, P10, and ACC are all pretty comparable. Perhaps it's more telling to drop, say, the three weakest teams from each conference since the remaining teams will likely determine overall conference success:

1632 SEC
1087 B12
1042 B10
1036 P10
992 ACC
717 BE

Actually, all that really shows is how far ahead the SEC is from everybody else....