The first edition of the 2024 Team Talent Composite finally released last week. It’s where 247 Sports takes the Composite high school recruiting ratings of everyone on a team, adds them up to get a final score, and then ranks all the FBS teams by those scores.
The state of Florida got a nice run there with Florida 12th, FSU 13th, and Miami 14th. Despite being 12th overall, though, UF ended up 6th among SEC teams. Both newcomers Texas (4th) and Oklahoma (8th) are ahead of the Gators, so you can thank realignment for them not being fourth in the league.
Of course, talent doesn’t solely win out. FSU may be 13th, but Georgia Tech is 46th, and the Yellow Jackets just knocked off the Seminoles in Ireland yesterday. We have the term “upset” precisely because the better team doesn’t always win, after all.
I do like the Team Talent Composite (TTC) as a starting point, but it’s not without its flaws.
They do transfer re-ranks over at 247, but they don’t include them in the TTC. That could be because it’s the Team Talent Composite, which blends recruiting rankings from 247 itself with Rivals, ESPN, and, as of this year, On3. Well, ESPN doesn’t re-rank players upon transfer like the rest do, so there can’t be an apples-to-apples comparison there. I wouldn’t be surprised if they start doing transfer re-ranks in the TTC once ESPN does start doing it.
It’s probably too time consuming to re-rank every player each year, but that’s what would give the thing the best result. Re-ranking transfers is, at least, a down payment on that considering how many players move around at this point. Transfer re-ranks would avoid things like the Mullen Florida teams getting a boost in the TTC from having high school 5-stars Justin Shorter and Lorenzo Lingard, neither of whom played like a 5-star in Gainesville. Shorter obviously had the better career than the injury-plagued Lingard, but he topped out at maybe a low 4-star threshold.
Florida is getting a little of that effect this year with Cormani McClain counting as a 5-star despite being re-ranked as a 4-star in each of 247, Rivals, and On3’s re-ranks. I’m not sure his time at Colorado is proof of much considering how much of a mess that place is these days, but also if he was a true 5-star at this point then he’d be pushing for major playing time despite how late he arrived. He’s not, though, according to any of the practice reports I’ve seen.
The other 5-stars that UF has are Jason Marshall, DJ Lagway, and LJ McCray. Marshall has played at times like a 5-star, but he needs to rebound from a rough 2023. Lagway and McCray are too good not to see the field, so they may be living up to the billing already. It’s obviously quite early for them.
Another issue with the TTC is that only so many players actually play major snaps. It’d be more useful to have these kinds of rankings for the two-deeps than the entire roster, as that way it would eliminate overestimation effects from a team having highly rated players injured or buried because they’re true freshmen.
There also is, call it the Kyle Trask problem. Trask was a 2-star out of high school. He ended up a Heisman finalist. He never transferred, so he was never going to be re-ranked.
Now think about FSU. DJ Uiagalelei was a 5-star in high school. He doesn’t play like a 5-star. The folks at 247 re-rated him a low 4-star on transfer, which, I don’t know. Seems a smidge generous.
Anyway, whether you use high school rankings or transfer re-ranks, a team would get more credit in the TTC for playing DJ U over Trask. That outcome makes no sense, but like I said before, you’d have to re-rank everyone to make everything make sense.
But even then, there is the matter that different players have different importance. It’s more valuable having a top quarterback than a top receiver, for instance. The extreme example is Georgia Tech from two decades ago when Reggie Ball was the one throwing to Calvin Johnson. Megatron was one of the best ever at both the college and pro level, but Ball was a below average slinger. GT won exactly seven games each of Johnson’s three seasons there.
So the TTC really is only a starting point, but the promise of someday using transfer re-ranks means there’s some hope for it to get better in the near future. We just have to wait on ESPN to update part of its recruiting infrastructure, which… maybe change “in the near future” to “by the end of the decade”.
It still won’t be perfect then. I don’t know about all the services, but 247 at least re-ranked DJ U better coming from Oregon State to FSU than it did Graham Mertz going from Wisconsin to Florida. Not by much, but better. I’m not sure there’s anyone who’d actually take Uiagalelei over Mertz at this point, though, nor would they have last winter after the way Mertz performed at Florida.
UF’s TTC rank at least is indicative of the fact that there is enough talent on hand to not be dreadful at anything. That’s been the case ever since the first TTC in 2015, and yet more often than not they’ve been dreadful on one side of the ball or the other. No matter what’s the case with the players, coaching does matter too.