The Ringer article on roster makeup

ben

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Nothing we didn't already know, but:

There’s a massive gulf between making the College Football Playoff and winning it, and you can measure the distance in talent. Around 60 percent of five-star recruits committed to the same five schools—Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, LSU, and Ohio State—over a five-year period ending in 2021, and that number increased later in that time span, according to the Sporting News. Those schools have combined to make 16 playoff appearances and win every national championship since the 2016 season. Texas A&M, which has the no. 1 class in 2022, has made strides to join that group.

There are two ways to win a national title: recruit at a top-five level or recruit at a level just below that but make up the difference with a historically good quarterback (Cam Newton, Deshaun Watson, and Trevor Lawrence are the only quarterbacks since 2011 to win a national championship without a top-five recruiting class on the roster). Recruiting is the lifeblood of the sport. If you listen to some people in the game, it is the only thing in sport. Last year, Ari Wasserman, a recruiting analyst at The Athletic, found that more than half of the first-round picks in the 2021 NFL draft were four- or five-star recruits, even though four- and five-star players make up an infinitesimally small number of college football players. Great high-schoolers more often than not become great college players who become great pros. There are exceptions, but the top programs are not in the exception business.
 
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We are gonna recruit a that level. Zero question in my mind. Its already started. In 2 months we picked up 3 top 100 players after not having any.
 
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I liked this quote:

Part of the reason Alabama and Georgia have put so much distance between themselves and the competition is because of dereliction of duty by other bluebloods. USC, Texas, Florida, Florida State, and Miami should win by default—each of them reside in one of the best recruiting grounds in the sport. That they don’t shows that the barrier for entry to the sport’s elite is higher than it has ever been.

Each of these schools has suffered different afflictions, so it’s impossible to paint with a broad brush except to say that they have massive recruiting and resource advantages that they haven’t used well to win games. This sort of incompetence requires catastrophic failure at all levels, from the administration down to the coaching staff. There’s some evidence this is changing with new hires at USC (Lincoln Riley), Miami (Mario Cristobal), and Florida (Billy Napier), but plenty of great hires have run into the same hurdles trying to return to the top shelf of the sport. When this happens, we say a program is “back,” but it rarely, if ever, happens these days. Texas is not back. Miami has not been back. Florida State has a long way to go until it can even jokingly proclaim to be back.
 
The author of the article (Kevin Clark) is a UM alum. He's awesome. A great follow on Twitter too.

He had an excellent interview with Ed Reed late last year for his podcast.
 
You can see this with the latest hirings.

Some of the coaches have great offensive reputations. Some of them have great defensive reputations. Some have neither.

But outside of UW, every team that is a Tier 1 team, or sees themselves as such, went with a guy that has an elite reputation on the recruiting trail.

The CEO-Recruiter is the standard now.
 
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Nothing we didn't already know, but:

There’s a massive gulf between making the College Football Playoff and winning it, and you can measure the distance in talent. Around 60 percent of five-star recruits committed to the same five schools—Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, LSU, and Ohio State—over a five-year period ending in 2021, and that number increased later in that time span, according to the Sporting News. Those schools have combined to make 16 playoff appearances and win every national championship since the 2016 season. Texas A&M, which has the no. 1 class in 2022, has made strides to join that group.

There are two ways to win a national title: recruit at a top-five level or recruit at a level just below that but make up the difference with a historically good quarterback (Cam Newton, Deshaun Watson, and Trevor Lawrence are the only quarterbacks since 2011 to win a national championship without a top-five recruiting class on the roster). Recruiting is the lifeblood of the sport. If you listen to some people in the game, it is the only thing in sport. Last year, Ari Wasserman, a recruiting analyst at The Athletic, found that more than half of the first-round picks in the 2021 NFL draft were four- or five-star recruits, even though four- and five-star players make up an infinitesimally small number of college football players. Great high-schoolers more often than not become great college players who become great pros. There are exceptions, but the top programs are not in the exception business.
The point about a great QB is why I beleive TVD, and hopefully Garcia after him, will pull UM up quicker than should be expected based on the overall roster of talent. That doesn’t mean our roster suddenly becomes playoff good, but with the right coaching/program and a great QB, UM has to be in the hunt for an ACC title every year and a top 15 ranking. After 2-3 years of Mario’s recruiting I think we make the final push.
 
It’s pretty funny when you look at the composite rankings. We are ecstatic our current class avg rating is 92.5 and Alabama’s whole roster averages over 94. The concentration of talent into a few schools is bad for the sport, but a natural evolution of the sport under current rules.
 
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The author of the article (Kevin Clark) is a UM alum. He's awesome. A great follow on Twitter too.

He had an excellent interview with Ed Reed late last year for his podcast.

Wasn't he the guy that recently interviewed Kirk Herbstreit, the video that someone else posted on another thread? The one where Kirk actually admitted that the Glenn Sharpe PI was pretty questionable, but that there was some play earlier in the game that was wrong, and the refs gave Ohio Taint a "makeup call"?
 
You can see this with the latest hirings.

Some of the coaches gave great offensive reputations. Some of great defensive reputations. Some have neither.

But outside of UW, every team that is a Tier 1 team, or sees themselves as such, went with a guy that has an elite reputation on the recruiting.

The CEO-Recruiter is the standard now.
Recruiting... Training... Retention

Absolutely three critical keys to getting our Canes back to where they belong.
 
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.

There are two ways to win a national title: recruit at a top-five level or recruit at a level just below that but make up the difference with a historically good quarterback (Cam Newton, Deshaun Watson, and Trevor Lawrence are the only quarterbacks since 2011 to win a national championship without a top-five recruiting class on the roster).
add TVD to that list after next season
 

Nothing we didn't already know, but:

There’s a massive gulf between making the College Football Playoff and winning it, and you can measure the distance in talent. Around 60 percent of five-star recruits committed to the same five schools—Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, LSU, and Ohio State—over a five-year period ending in 2021, and that number increased later in that time span, according to the Sporting News. Those schools have combined to make 16 playoff appearances and win every national championship since the 2016 season. Texas A&M, which has the no. 1 class in 2022, has made strides to join that group.

There are two ways to win a national title: recruit at a top-five level or recruit at a level just below that but make up the difference with a historically good quarterback (Cam Newton, Deshaun Watson, and Trevor Lawrence are the only quarterbacks since 2011 to win a national championship without a top-five recruiting class on the roster). Recruiting is the lifeblood of the sport. If you listen to some people in the game, it is the only thing in sport. Last year, Ari Wasserman, a recruiting analyst at The Athletic, found that more than half of the first-round picks in the 2021 NFL draft were four- or five-star recruits, even though four- and five-star players make up an infinitesimally small number of college football players. Great high-schoolers more often than not become great college players who become great pros. There are exceptions, but the top programs are not in the exception business.

I'll just add that recruiting rankings are pretty flawed in itself. Also, not denying we need more, we absolutely do, at every position every year.

I want to say it was @Cryptical Envelopment @DMoney @Cribby or someone who post often and is knowledgeable, that may have posted this, but if you look at the 4 and 5 star kids in, we'll use Rivals, is about 300 a year, which is higher then the number of all players drafted in 1 year! So of course half of the 1st round will be 4 or 5 star kids. They cast a wide net and say, look we got this person right (Greg Rousseau is a great example, he was a low 4 star 5.8 and only after he committed to us). So they were taking a flyer, but they didn't know anything about him, or his projection to a DE, simply were following the offers. Mind you, I don't think Manny knew he'd be that good otherwise his eye for talent would have been the same for all the other ends on the team.
 
I'll just add that recruiting rankings are pretty flawed in itself. Also, not denying we need more, we absolutely do, at every position every year.

I want to say it was @Cryptical Envelopment @DMoney @Cribby or someone who post often and is knowledgeable, that may have posted this, but if you look at the 4 and 5 star kids in, we'll use Rivals, is about 300 a year, which is higher then the number of all players drafted in 1 year! So of course half of the 1st round will be 4 or 5 star kids. They cast a wide net and say, look we got this person right (Greg Rousseau is a great example, he was a low 4 star 5.8 and only after he committed to us). So they were taking a flyer, but they didn't know anything about him, or his projection to a DE, simply were following the offers. Mind you, I don't think Manny knew he'd be that good otherwise his eye for talent would have been the same for all the other ends on the team.

They aren't flawed at all. There is a high correlation between ranking and future draft status. The random 3 star or 2 star that goes 1st round doesn't disprove that. In any given hear there are a 1,000 three star kids. The fact that half the first round is made of kids that represent probably 10% (4-5star) of total recruits for any given year speaks to how important it is to recruit highly ranked players, because you have MUCH higher probability of those players actually being good.
 
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