The ARR® for 2008.

The Alternative Recruiting Rankings® provided to you by DublinSaab.

The way that recruiting classes are assessed is by giving each player that is recruited by a given team a certain point value and then adding up the total value of all payers ranked to give a total score. It is these scores that are used to rank a schools class.

While this is the industry standard I feel that it misses the point. Under the accepted system a school with a large number of mediocre players can have a class ranking higher than a school with a small number of great players. The problem with this is that a school like USC which only needs a few players to augment the tremendous talent they already have may have a lower class ranking than a school like Alabama, which at the moment needs as many players as they can get as they have little in the way of talent. This gives fans an unrealistic assessment of the future viability of their school.

This is where I come in with my ARR® where I rank the individual score of the average recruit and not the aggregate score. So, with no further a due…

Rank	School	Avg. Player Score	Traditional Ranking*
1	USC	121.68	7
2	Notre Dame	119.30	2
3	Florida	118.18	3
4	Ohio State	117.31	9
5	Oklahoma	115.33	5
6	Georgia	96.71	6
7	Texas	95.95	14
8	Michigan	92.29	10
9	Alabama	88.62	1
10	UCLA	83.65	13
11	LSU	82.08	11
12	Clemson	81.27	12
13	FL State	75.03	8
14	Miami (FL)	74.76	4
15	Colorado	71.90	15
16	Oregon	71.53	19
17	Pitt	62.05	29
18	Texas A&M	61.75	16
19	S. Carolina	60.09	22
20	N. Carolina	59.56	34
21	Maryland	58.95	32
22	Tennessee	57.06	36
23	Mizzou	52.78	26
24	Cal	50.95	35
25	Penn St.	50.00	42

The team that faired the worst under the ARR® was Miami (FL) which fell 10 spots due to having a large class, but not a lot of great players and the team that came out like roses was Pen State raising 17 spots thanks to a small class of decent players.

I believe that the ARR® is a better ranking system because it shows the quality of players a stable program like USC or Ohio State are bringing in without the large class bias of schools with troubles or under transitions like Miami (FL), Alabama or Minnesota which came up #17 in the traditional rankings but pulls up a more appropriate #31 in the ARR®.

Feel free to comment!

*These are the rankings as according to Rivals.com, other sources may have slightly different ranks and scores but you get the idea. Don’t you?