Clemson Unlikely To Receive Recruiting Bump from National Championship

In college football recruiting is everything. Recruit enough top prospects and you can win a national championship. Do it consistently and you’ll become and remain a college football powerhouse. One of the “truths” that has always been thrown around in recruiting is that a national champion receives a bump in the rankings after winning the title. Not necessarily in the immediate class after the title, but a year later.

Since the class of 2018 is already shaping up to be one of the best in history, I wanted to look and see what type of bump Clemson could see from the national title. To do this I looked at every recruiting class from 2007-2017. All of the data comes from 247. It was the best way to provide a comprehensive look at recruiting in terms of both rankings and average player rating.

In the charts below I noted the class rank and median player rating for each of the national champions from the past 10 seasons. This gave me a group of 7 teams; Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Florida, FSU, LSU, and Ohio State. From these numbers I calculated and average, and more important median value for each team over these 11 recruiting classes.

Now one of the limitations in determining a recruiting bump comes in the general wishy-washy nature of recruiting rankings. Because of how rankings are calculated as well as the goals of each coaching staff, it isn’t unusual to see some swings in a teams recruiting ranking year by year. To account for this, and try to identify any sort of bump, I calculated the standard deviation for each team across these recruiting classes. This gives us what may be an expected change from year to year for recruiting for a variety of factors.

From this I looked at the two recruiting classes immediately after a national title. So for example I looked at Ohio State and the class of 2015 and class of 2016 and looked at how far those rankings strayed from the median rankings of Ohio State. The idea here is that if the rankings were outside of the standard deviation then there could be a bump in recruiting. Of course any change in the rankings within the standard deviation could be due to winning a national championship as well. But if it is within the standard deviation my thought is that type of improvement can be seen through other endeavors in recruiting.

Unfortunately any bump that could exist from recruiting does not appear to be measurable. Only one team saw their rankings improve more than the standard deviation, Florida. They were also the only team to see a real bump in player ratings the year after the national title.

Player ratings are in the same boat and are even more interesting. Florida is once again the only team that appears to be getting a bump, but it is worth noting that their recruiting, in general, has fallen off in the latter half of the recruiting rankings, well after they last won a national title.

And ultimately that is really the point here. To win a national title you have to have a lot of talent on your team. It is almost impossible to get lucky enough for 15 games, you need that talent. Because of that your national champions are going to be recruiting at an extremely high level and it is hard to improve on that. Below you can see the player ratings by year in graph form. There is a noticeable trend for each team around when they won a national title. They all have rather high average player ratings.

A national championship could help with individual recruits, but don’t expect Clemson to pull a fantastic class out of nowhere because of it, instead expect those great recruiting classes to continue. Until your coach leaves, or gets old.