National Signing Day 2012: Top Recruiting Classes Are Required to Win the BCS

Every year as National Signing Day approaches and then fades away into the horizon of the college football offseason, we are offered up a healthy dose of stats reminding us that top-ranked high school recruits don’t necessarily guarantee All-American players or NFL-caliber talent.

And, while that’s absolutely correct in some cases, and can certainly be substantiated with cold hard facts, it’s important not to underplay the importance of the recruiting rankings as a whole.

You can mention five-star guys out of high school that didn’t amount to much from a college career standpoint.

Then, you can pinpoint guys who were one-star—or no-star—prospects who are All-Everything and go on to fruitful NFL careers.

But this doesn’t mean that the recruiting rankings are completely inaccurate or that they are not useful indicators in predicting how teams will fare in the future, especially from a cumulative class ranking.

While you can argue each athlete’s star rating and his subsequent potential impact on a program, it’s hard to refute that assembling a package consisting of a lot of highly-ranked recruits won’t result in at lest some palpable level of on-field success.

And this, too, can be substantiated with cold hard facts.

If you look back over the past five BCS championship game participants, no senior class—meaning the guys who were signed four years previous to the title season—was ranked by Rivals.com lower than No. 15 as a recruit group.

Furthermore, looking back at the same 10 teams that played in the title game, no junior class—meaning the athletes that were signed three years before the championship game season—was ranked by Rivals.com lower than No. 22 as a recruiting class.

To offer a more specific example to illustrate this, Alabama's most recent team—the one that just won the BCS National Championship—was led by the No. 1 rated group of recruits from 2008 and was bolstered by the No. 1 class from 2009.

The runner-up in 2011, LSU, featured the No. 11 rated recruits from the class of 2008 and the No. 2 group from 2009.

The lowest ranked recruiting classes—technically made up of juniors and seniors—to win it all in the last five years was the 2010 Auburn team, wich was led by the No. 7 rated group from 2007 and the No. 20 ranked class from 2008.

Of the runners-up, the lowest ranked recruit groups also came from 2010 via Oregon, which was led by the No. 11 class of 2007 and then the No. 19 rated class from 2008.

Want more?

The highest ranking runner-up in terms of upperclassmen recruiting ratings was the 2009 Texas team that owned the No. 5 class of 2006 and the No. 5 class of 2007, only to lose to Alabama who was led by the No. 11 class of 2006 and the No. 10 class of 2007.

All this stimulating data paints a pretty clear picture—to win a national championship, you’re going to need a team led by guys who started their college career as members of highly-ranked recruiting class.

And, if we want to use history to devise an actual formula for success, it's this—the BCS champion will need to hauled in a top-15 class four years before they win it all, along with a top-22 group of recruits from three years prior to digging in to the big, cheesy enchilada.

Using this approach in terms of the class of 2012—which will at least be somewhat solidified tomorrow—the BCS champion of 2015 will be among the top 15 teams in the final Rivals.com recruiting rankings.

As of today, the team who will win it all in four years is either Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, Florida State, Miami FL, Texas A&M, Clemson, USC, LSU, Tennessee, UCLA or South Carolina.

Of course, this could all be screwed up royally if any of these teams slip out of the top 22 recruiting rankings for the class of 2013 that will be signed next February.

Indeed, you can argue the star ratings, the recruiting hoopla and the tons of virtual ink dedicated to who is going where on signing day.

But, you simply can’t deny that championship teams are built on top-rated recruiting classes.