Every year, a few teams consistently rise to the top of the recruiting rankings. Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, Georgia, and a few others are consistently at the top, especially in the last few years. (We’ll leave out Ohio State’s relatively weak composite ranking from last year, mostly due to a small class with the coaching turnover.)
Still, there are generally two parts to recruiting rankings. The first is how good the incoming players are; the second is how many players you can get. Both of those matter. Having a lot of recruits doesn’t help much if they’re not the best. And having top players doesn’t isn’t enough if you don’t have a team full of them.
Bud Elliot, an SBNation reporter who founded TomahawkNation.com, has noticed a very interesting trend. As he sent out in the daily newsletter for The Banner Society, has found an interesting trend. In general, only teams that have a 50% or higher ratio of “blue chip” recruits (meaning 4-star or 5-star recruits) over the past four years contend for the National Championship.
To track this, he keeps track of his Blue-Chip Ratio. It’s very simple: how many of a team’s overall signees are 4-star or 5-star recruits? The numbers won’t surprise you much, but are worth looking at.
There are a lot of takeaways from his stat, but I just want to focus on one. Ohio State finally passed Alabama this year for the team with the highest percentage of blue chips. So if you were worried about Ohio State’s 2019 class being the weakest in a long time, here’s more evidence not to. The Buckeyes are well stocked and will be fine. One small class won’t hurt the program, and the overall quality of all the players proves it.
