2014 Orange Bowl Clemson vs. Ohio State Depth Chart Analysis

We did not put together an analysis prior to the Orange Bowl back in January.  Since the bowl, I received several requests to put that article together.  This one may be a bit late but is of interest to many of our viewers.  Apologies for the tardiness but better late than never.

We'll compare these two teams' talent levels prior to the 2014 Orange Bowl based on officially released two-deep depth charts. Depth charts for both teams were attained DIRECTLY from the Clemson website (www.clemsontigers.com). A pdf version of this can still be found there (as of the time of this writing) if you are curious. I will go ahead and tell you that because of injuries and depth chart adjustments between the release of this information and game time, some items here may be a little out of place but in an effort to maintain consistency, I continues to use both teams' depth charts as presented on the official website.

We should not have to tell you this, but some folks debate what to take from these articles. 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 information out there. This article shows recruiting data for the depth chart roster as referenced above. 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. Players whose Scout/Rivals data was not available but were signed were 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 figure and first table both show an average of offensive players, defensive players, and specialist listed on the two-deep roster. The second through fourth tables show the two-deep roster used for analysis along with the recruiting ratings for each player on the roster.

Overall, OSU outpaced Clemson by quite a large margin in terms of recruited talent on both offense and defense.  There was about a half a star per player difference between the two teams on both offense and defense.   Specialists' talent levels were about equal for both squads.  This category is about worthless and next season I'll likely make adjustments on its presentation because its non-weighted inclusion shifted the overall average quite a bit.

Offense

Defense

Specialists