2008-2012 Recruiting Cycle: Clemson/ACC Coastal Comparison

We recently looked at the 2012 recruiting cycle for the ACC Coastal. We do realize that one recruiting class does not make a program. Accordingly, we want to put this class in perspective by looking at ACC Coastal schools' results over the past five cycles and compare them to Clemson. Five cycles were chosen because these are the only cycles that directly factor into the 2012 teams because players signed in 2008 and redshirted will be seniors this year (and all future classes have eligibility as well). Here is our analysis and comparison between Clemson and the ACC Atlantic over the past five cycles.

And....the typical disclaimer:

We should not have to tell you this, but some folks debate what to take from these articles and the data presented here. We expect you, the reader, to form an opinion of your own. Often we will give you our take on things, but you should independently form your own thoughts based on all information available to you. When evaluating a particular player, we encourage you to view film for yourself and form your own opinions about a player. This article shows recruiting data for individual teams. It does not weigh experience nor does it evaluate coaching, preparation, etc... We think this is an interesting and valuable tool that is useful in overall program evaluation because there is a link between these star ratings and other metrics in both college football and the NFL.

Keep in mind as you look through this data that only players who were officially signed were given a "Star Rating". Players who were not signed could not be quantitatively assessed a recruiting rating. Such players get a "NA" rating and were not included in the averaged data. Again, all data was attained from www.Scout.com and www.Rivals.com. A player whose Scout/Rivals data was not available but was signed was assigned a "NR". We picked carefully through the data and believe all is correct. However, if we've overlooked an item we apologize in advance and ask that you point it out so that we can make the correction in our database.

The following Figures and Tables associated with those figures (scroll to the article's end) illustrate the recruiting star per player ranking for each team as well as the players signed data.

The first item I am sure you noticed was Clemson's dominance in the stars per player category. The Tigers had the highest star per player average for each season and was 0.09 stars per player better than 2^nd best Miami. North Carolina and Virginia Tech were the only other schools who boasted a star average above 3 for the five year period. The Coastal Conference average star ratings over this time period were the following: Rivals 2.98, Scout 2.89, Average of the Two: 2.94.

Clemson, at 22 players per class, trailed all schools sans Duke and Georgia Tech in this category over the past five years. Miami averaged over 26 signees per class and Va Tech 24. As we've said before, you have to know the history and situations the schools faced to understand how these numbers played out. Clearly Clemson's 12 member 2009 class dropped their average for this category.

Overall, Clemson seems to have recruited better than their Coastal opponents over the past five cycles. These numbers indicate that while other classes were larger, the quality of the players CU pulled was better than the opposition and the classes large enough to suspect quantity of talent is not an issue. So far, Clemson and Florida State are the two best recruiting schools per data acquired and used in this series.