Why has Clemson so outperformed the rankings?

Jan 23, 2020, 11:36 AM

I've thought about this question for awhile now: on paper we shouldn't be as dominant as we are, not per the recruiting services. We rarely have cracked the Top-10 in recruiting rankings and this is the first year we've ever even gotten close to that Recruiting National Championship that Alabama almost always wins. But one thing, IMHO, the recruiting services consistently get wrong is, you can't just add up all the scores on a recruiting class like it's a numerical rating on Madden or those old NCAA Football console games they're about to start making again.

Because at the end of the day, it's also about what positions you get those players. And there's four types of players college coaches just can't find enough of:

1) Quarterbacks. The obvious. Only so many really good ones out there, especially really good ones who throw a good ball and can make plays with their feet and lead a team and stay out of the bars and keep from getting The Big Head when they're the #1 Big Man on Campus...tough.
2) Defensive tackles. Only so many 6'4+, 275+ "jumbo athlete" types with the quicks and lower-body strength and cat base (you've gotta have serious contact balance or an OG will put you on your butt) to play this spot.
3) Corners. Again, what everybody wants is those 6'0"+ guys who can flip their hips so they can turn and run in phase. Plenty of guys 6'O"+ who can really run...but most of them simply don't have the hip turn to play CB and so what they play instead is WR or S. Go to camp after camp after camp...they just aren't out there. Derion Kendrick was a durn good WR, but he made himself millions - maybe tens of millions - in future NFL earnings by switching from WR to CB because most guys just can't.

And finally...
4) LT. Maybe the hardest spot there is to fill because you have to do so much projection. Filling the LG to RT spots is much easier, but finding that kid who's 6'5"+ with the feet to match a speed rush around the edge and the wingspan to not get rag-dolled by the bull-rush and the lower-body strength to not get put on roller skates...that's hard, because those guys simply do not usually exist at age 16 or 17 when you're recruiting them. You have to project how they're going to develop once you put 30-40 pounds (or more!) on them and how they're going to develop in the weightroom and how they're going to develop as technicians.

Clemson dominates at all those spots in recruiting...and also at pass-rusher, which would likely be Spot #5 in terms of hard-to-find positions. Look at the laundry list of guys we've at recently from all those spots, and how many of the 5-stars and high-end 4's we've signed recently were from those positions.

So it isn't necessarily that Clemson is dominating recruiting, it's that we're dominating recruiting at the right spots. Other spots - LB, S, the OL from LG to RT, we've been content to just develop somewhat lesser-rated guys even if they weren't necessarily 5-star guys coming out of high school. We tend to hold onto those guys for 4-5 years, and they tend to almost invariably be those high-character, coachable, "Clemson-type" guys that seemingly form the backbone of our player culture.

It's an interesting formula...and one, frankly, our rivals - especially OSU and Alabama - have seemingly not replicated. They try to get 5-star guys everywhere. And that trend for Clemson has continued even the last couple of years when Clemson's coaching staff has had the ability to pretty much go out and sign anybody they wanted...the guys they've seemed to want have continued to look pretty much exactly like the ones who just left.

Is our staff deliberately recruiting away from 5-star, 3-and-done-type guys at half the positions on the field?

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down