Josh Gattis’ Tweet And Ohio State’s Recruiting Hot Streak
With the addition of four-star CB Andre Turrentine on Tuesday, Ohio State has now added four players to its class of 2021 in the past three days.
The Buckeyes now have 14 commits already in for 2021, and it’s entirely possible that more could follow soon.
That’s more commits than any program in the nation other than Florida, which also has 14. In fact, no one other than the Buckeyes and Gators has more than 10 players currently committed.
Nine of the 14 players currently pledged to the Buckeyes are ranked as one of the 10 best at their position in the entire nation.
They have the No. 1 guard, No. 2 defensive end and inside linebacker, No. 3 pro-style quarterback, No. 4 and No. 6 corners, No. 6 running back, and No. 8 wide receiver and defensive tackle.
They also have the No. 12 wide receiver, the No. 15 tackle, No. 16 tight end, No. 18 safety, and No. 31 corner.
Ohio State already holds commitments from 11 of the top-150 players in the nation. The entire rest of the Big Ten has only three at the moment. And while it’s still relatively early in the cycle, the Buckeyes’ current list of 11 is almost as many as the entire rest of the league brought in (15) for the 2020 class.
It’s tempting to dismiss recruiting rankings as something that doesn’t really matter. “You stop being a five-star the minute you enroll” and all that.
And it’s easy to point to examples where the rankings didn’t turn out to be right. “AJ Hawk was a three-star while Mike D’Andrea was a five-star,” etc. But as the old saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Here’s what the data says: No one has won a national championship in the modern recruiting era (2005-present) without signing classes made up of at least 50 percent 4-star and 5-star prospects. This concept is known as the Blue Chip Ratio, and was pioneered by Bud Elliott, who now writes for 247.
Only a tiny fraction of FBS programs (16 of 130) recruit at that level, and many of them are only barely in the club. The 2019 Buckeye team considered one of the most talented in school history was atop the 2019 list with 81 percent blue chips.
When players like Chase Young, Jeff Okudah, and JK Dobbins leave for the NFL, you need to keep replacing them with similarly-talented recruits or your results start to trail off.
OSU has done that, and is in the process of lining up replacements for next year’s departing stars now. The Buckeyes had the No. 5 overall class in 2020, and are on track to finish far higher than that in 2021.
From 2011 until now, Ohio State has finished with the highest-ranked class in the Big Ten in every season but one.
All it took for that single outlier to happen was a combination of Urban Meyer’s tumultuous final season, plus a smaller-than-usual class size. Even then, the Buckeyes finished with the highest average player ranking in the league.
You can see the results on the field. The Bucks have now won three straight outright conference titles, something no other program in Big Ten history has ever done.
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https://theozone.net/2020/03/josh-gattis-tweet-and-ohio-states-recruiting-hot-streak/