https://theathletic.com/2697025/202...chievers-from-Cockeye-state-to-florida-state/
College football's biggest overachievers and underachievers based on recruiting, from Cockeye State to Florida State
by Max Olson, The Athletic
As The Athletic wraps up its offseason State of the Program series, there's one feature of our annual preseason previews that got me thinking about expectations versus reality in college football.
There's a chart in each installment that compares a team's four-year performance with their recruiting class ranking. For some programs, those lines are closely related. And for others, there exists a sizable gap -- good or bad -- between the talent level they're supposed to have and the on-field results they're getting. Nebraska, for example, would fall into the latter category.
Let's take a closer look at that disparity because it can offer a decent answer to this question: Which college football programs have been the biggest overachievers and underachievers of the past four years?
Assessing that requires a slightly different approach. We're still using the past four years of the Massey ratings, which are a composite of a wide array of human polls and computer rankings, to rank these programs from No. 1 to No. 130 based on their average four-year finish.
In this case, it seemed wiser to compare those results against teams' average recruiting ranking in the 247Sports Composite from 2015 to 2018. Why that time? Because the players signed in those classes decided how teams performed from 2017 to 2020. Considering how much attrition occurs and how many players enter the draft early, it made more sense to start with 2015 and ensure the 2018 class was factored in.
It's also important to note 247Sports does not include incoming or outgoing transfers in a team's class ranking, so a four-year average ranking can't completely capture the caliber of talent every team is bringing in. But these class rankings are based on the composite player ratings of the recruiting industry, so, like Massey, they are helpful in better capturing the consensus.
Let's start with the Power 5 programs that have done the best job of outperforming expectations, finishing with a better four-year Massey ranking than their four-year recruiting ranking.
Overachievers: Power 5
| Team | Massey Rank | 247 Rank | +/- | |
| 1 | Cockeye State | 19 | 57 | +38 |
| 2 | Cockeye | 8 | 44 | +36 |
| 3 | Wisconsin | 11 | 40 | +29 |
| 4 | Boston College | 45 | 72 | +27 |
| 5 | Northwestern | 30 | 52 | +22 |
| 6 | Oklahoma State | 18 | 38 | +20 |
| 7 | Kansas State | 44 | 64 | +20 |
| 8 | Wake Forest | 41 | 60 | +19 |
| 9 | Utah | 21 | 36 | +15 |
| 10 | Indiana | 38 | 53 | +15 |
The first impression here? This list is pretty darn Midwestern.
Cockeye State is 32-19 in the past four years under Matt Campbell despite never signing a top-40 recruiting class. That staff has built up their program to the point that their three-stars are becoming all-conference players, so it's not surprising to see them top the list. The Cyclones' rival Cockeye has been sneaky good in recent years -- would you have guessed the Cockeyes were a top-10 team in the Massey ratings over this four year period? -- and is usually going to rate highly in assessments like these under Kirk Ferentz.
It's no surprise to see many of the programs that rank right up with them. Wisconsin, Northwestern, Oklahoma State, Kansas State and Utah have long been known for doing more with less and sticking to similar blueprints of the kind of players and program they want. They even play and win similarly as teams that traditionally make fewer mistakes.
Their overachieving is also a matter of consistency over time. Ferentz, Pat Fitzgerald, Mike Gundy and Kyle Whittingham are four of the five longest-tenured head coaches at the Power 5 level, and Dave Clawson is in his eighth year at Wake Forest.
It's fair to wonder whether the number of Midwestern schools on this list is in some ways a reflection of the recruiting industry, showing that players on the commit lists of schools like Cockeye and Cockeye State might not get as much exposure and go overlooked. Though there's usually some truth to that, the recruiting services aren't wrong about most of these prospects. The majority of these programs' classes are made up of three-star players who have intriguing traits and check the right boxes in terms of fit and need several years of hard work to unlock their potential. The best overachievers have created the right systems and environment to develop and deploy that talent.
Boston College might seem like a mildly surprising outlier here, but going 26-23 over a four-year period despite having the lowest-ranked recruiting among Power 5 programs is a pretty solid feat. Second-year coach Jeff Hafley is quickly changing that dynamic with a 2021 signing class that is ranked 37th and a 2022 group that's 13th nationally.
Overachievers: Group of 5
| Team | Massey Rank | 247 Rank | +/- | |
| 1 | Appalachian State | 24 | 114 | +90 |
| 2 | Army | 47 | 123 | +76 |
| 3 | Buffalo | 51 | 125 | +74 |
| 4 | Air Force | 67 | 120 | +53 |
| 5 | Central Florida | 12 | 63 | +51 |
| 6 | Ohio | 62 | 112 | +50 |
| 7 | Louisiana-Lafayette | 58 | 106 | +48 |
| 8 | Boise State | 16 | 62 | +46 |
| 9 | Memphis | 26 | 71 | +45 |
| 10 | Wyoming | 80 | 117 | +37 |
| 11 | Cincinnati | 31 | 65 | +34 |
| 12 | Troy | 72 | 105 | +33 |
| 13 | Coastal Carolina | 94 | 126 | +32 |
| 14 | Navy | 68 | 99 | +31 |
| 15 | San Diego State | 48 | 75 | +27 |
| 16 | Southern Methodist | 54 | 78 | +24 |
| 17 | Fresno State | 56 | 79 | +23 |
| 18 | Marshall | 52 | 73 | +21 |
| 19 | Florida Atlantic | 53 | 74 | +21 |
| 20 | Eastern Michigan | 100 | 121 | +21 |
Let's start here with the Group of 5 overachievers: 247Sports and the recruiting industry at large were not set up with the intent to deeply evaluate every player who signs with every FBS school. That’s not at all a criticism, but it should be acknowledged. It’s also difficult for these programs to land, hold on to and sign players who become four- or five-star recruits.
For those reasons, it’s no surprise the majority of Group of 5 programs (41 of 65) are in the overachiever category.
Appalachian State is the king of the overachievers by these measures. The Sun Belt power has finished in the top 30 of the Massey ratings in each of the past three years. The Mountaineers’ best recruiting finish from 2015 to 2018 was 107th. That class ended up finishing 13th in The Athletic's 2017 recruiting re-rank exercise earlier this year. They’ll typically get four or five of their best commits poached by Power 5 schools each year, which tells you how much opposing coaches in their region respect their evaluations. They’ve also had three head coaches during this four-year stretch, which speaks to the program’s consistent culture and stability.
Buffalo ranking among the biggest Group of 5 overachievers should be mighty encouraging to fans of Kansas' struggling program. Lance Leipold and his coaches are bringing a proven track record for evaluations and development to their new job. By 247Sports Composite standards, Buffalo was a bottom-five FBS program in recruiting from 2015 to 2018. Leipold went 30-16 with those players.
Boise State had the best average class ranking of these programs at No. 62, followed by UCF at No. 63. They're also the two Group of 5 programs with the highest finishes in the four-year Massey average. Now their head coaches are running SEC teams. These top-20 overachieving programs have produced a total of nine Power 5 head coaches since the end of the 2017 season, with several more to come.
The Massey ratings help add a little perspective when it comes to three remarkable turnarounds during this four-year period. Louisiana-Lafayette was No. 116 in the Massey ratings in 2017 before Billy Napier was hired and finished No. 17 last season. Coastal Carolina ranked 120th in Jamey Chadwell's fist season as interim head coach and finished No. 13 in 2020. Cincinnati was all the way back at No. 101 in Luke #2ndChoice's first season and climbed to No. 8 in last year's standings.
The recruiting rules at Army, Air Force and Navy are totally different from their Group of 5 peers, making their huge classes difficult for the recruiting industry to effectively rate and rank. But there's no doubt they still belong among the consistent overachievers on this list.
Underachievers - Power 5
| Team | Massey Rank | 247 Rank | +/- | |
| 1 | Arkansas | 103 | 30 | -73 |
| 2 | Rutgers | 112 | 54 | -58 |
| 3 | Florida State | 61 | 5 | -56 |
| 4 | Maryland | 87 | 32 | -55 |
| 5 | UCLA | 71 | 16 | -55 |
| 6 | Illinois | 108 | 55 | -53 |
| 7 | Nebraska | 76 | 25 | -51 |
| 8 | Tennessee | 62 | 13 | -49 |
| 9 | Vanderbilt | 99 | 51 | -48 |
| 10 | Kansas | 117 | 70 | -47 |
Well, there it is. The Power 5 programs that are doing less with more since 2017. If your favorite team made this list, you can't act too surprised. The common theme among the top 10 is fairly obvious, too. Each program has gone through at least one head coaching change since 2017, and a few have experienced multiple firings.
The clear standout here is Florida State. It's hard to believe a program that won a national title as recently as the Seminoles did could slide like this. Jimbo Fisher had them recruiting at a steady top-five level in the final years of his tenure. Did he actually leave behind a top-five roster when he departed for Texas A&M? No, not quite. But a bad coaching hire and a ton of attrition and instability can cause any program to take a dramatic step backward.
Arkansas has proved over the decade that, even with several coaching changes, it can recruit at a top-30 level pretty much every year. Sure, the SEC West is a tough place to live. But the Razorbacks are able to get good enough players that it should never get as bad as it did under Chad Morris. They finished No. 105 and No. 114 in the Massey ratings during Morris' two-year tenure, and that's why they top this list. Second-year coach Sam Pittman is getting Arkansas pointed back in the right direction and is going to fix this.
UCLA is another curious case, a program that recruited at a top 15-20 level under Jim Mora and then went through both a major roster purge under Chip Kelly and a decline in the recruiting rankings. They're a big underachiever here based on the Mora-era recruiting results. Kelly's full recruiting cycles have yielded an average class ranking of 35th. That's.....one way to underachieve less. UCLA's Massey rating has improved slightly in each of Kelly's three seasons, but it's about time for the Bruins to start getting much better on the field.
Among the six programs here that have recently shown they can recruit at a top-30 level -- Florida State, Tennessee, UCLA, Nebraska, Arkansas and Maryland -- it will be interesting to see which ones can bounce back in a meaningful way the fastest. And let's not overlook Rutgers, which is making big strides in recruiting this year.
As for the Group of 5? The same things can be said for many of their struggling underachievers. East Carolina, Bowling Green, Connecticut, Colorado State and Texas-San Antonio top the list. Four of those five have gone through coaching changes in recent years and are trying to build back up.
The Middle
There's one last group worth addressing: the Power 5 programs that are exactly as successful as they should be. The list of programs whose four-year Massey ratings are right in line with their four-year recruiting rankings is an interesting one.
If you look at the full spectrum of Power 5 programs, Alabama finished in the same spot in both rankings, obviously, as did Texas A&M and Missouri. Ohio State, Penn State, Notre Dame, Clemson and Oklahoma are among the programs that have performed a tiny bit better than they should have been over these last four seasons, at least based on the perception of their recruiting.
And then Georgia, LSU, Oregon, Auburn, Florida, Texas and Michigan have been a little worse, but not by much. Two of those programs paid massive sums this offseason to fire their successful head coaches in the hopes that somebody else can do better. That says plenty about the pressure at the top, doesn't it?
By these measures, Auburn and Texas aren't two of the worst underachievers in college football. But at schools like those, if you're not winning at the highest level, you're going to feel like one.
