The consolidation of power in college football recruiting since 2005

Since 2005, it appears as if a few teams have become recruiting super powers. Of course, there were good recruiters and power house teams before that. But it seems as if many of the top recruits have been ending up at the same ‘ol schools – Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, and Georgia. In looking at this, some noticeable trends emerged.

I took all the teams that had an average composite recruit rating of at least 1 standard deviation above the Power 5 mean and separated them out from the rest of college football. The full list is at the bottom of the page. There were 14 teams. I then counted up how many recruits each of these teams had each year back to 2005 that were rated at least 0.9300. It is this rating that I have found to be a sort of ‘cutoff’ to probability for getting drafted by an NFL team. Players rated over 0.9300 are more likely to be drafted than those under.

Below we can see the proportion of how these teams powered up.

So, over time we can see how the concentration of recruiting power has moved from the bottom left to the top right. We can also see how good UF was under Meyer and how bad we were under Mac. Furthermore, it shows that LSU, Alabama, and Georgia are soaking up a ton of talent in the SEC, making the task of winning the conference (if you’re not one of those teams) probably much harder.

The data:

Team	overall avg	rank	Standardized	5-stars	4-stars	3-stars	Conf.
USC	0.9214	1	2.177	48	154	99	Pac-12
Ohio State	0.9201	2	2.133	32	188	82	Big Ten
Alabama	0.9169	3	2.021	52	202	126	SEC
Texas	0.9126	4	1.866	24	204	116	Big 12
Georgia	0.9102	5	1.783	42	174	135	SEC
Florida	0.9091	6	1.744	30	177	132	SEC
LSU	0.9081	7	1.710	27	192	133	SEC
Florida State	0.9036	8	1.549	36	152	153	ACC
Notre Dame	0.9023	9	1.504	13	180	142	Ind
Oklahoma	0.8982	10	1.359	15	162	152	Big 12
Michigan	0.8939	11	1.208	12	173	167	Big Ten
Clemson	0.8895	12	1.052	25	125	168	ACC
Miami	0.8894	13	1.049	13	131	175	ACC
Auburn	0.8886	14	1.021	13	155	178	SEC