aggy's 'top-10' class... NOT.

jayakris

jayakris

2,500+ Posts
Funny stuff. A tweet from Brent Zwerneman, an aggy reporter for Houston Chronicle -The Link

"Gentle reminder Kevin Sumlin's signing day press conference to discuss a Top 10 Texas A&M class is 3 p.m. today."

The replies below are funny.

"Why is Sumlin going to talk about Charlie Strong's class?"
"top 10 in the Sec west maybe"
"jumping the gun a little early on the Fulmer Cup rankings, aren't you?"
"Top 10 by what ranking service?"
"top 10 according to every Cracker Barrel east of the Brazos?"

LOL.
 
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Thats too funny
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Many of those guys are funny, but when I stumbled over there (no offense Sumlin), they were going nuts trying to twist the final recruiting rankings every which but loose to put them ahead.

I had no idea of the perverse things that could be done with math.
 
It would take too long to explain and we cannot speak slowly enough. But let me tell you a story about 3 Billy Goats and a troll that was under the bridge. Hint, the troll lost.
 
34blast, not so fast. The 247 rankings you showed are not their own. They are the composite rankings (which now has a&m at #12 anyway). The 247s industry composite actually gets messed up by rivals rankings which give undue weight to the 5-star players and a few other weird things. 247's own rankings (based on their own player ratings) is what you should use if you are giving individual services' rankings (and they have UT at #8 and A&M at #14). I have seen even 247's own guys acknowledge that they need to tweak their composite team ranking because of the weird stuff rivals does. It is not a straight average of the 4 services' rankings.

The worst player evaluators and class-rank evaluators have been rivals for several years now (ask Mack Brown if you doubt that. We had him as our coach). ESPN and 247 rankings have held up better on most players. Check it, if you want.

Anyway, here are the rankings now, after the dust settled:

Scout: UT 8 / A&M 10
ESPN: UT 9 / A&M 12
247: UT 8 / A&M 14
Rivals: UT 12 / A&M 10

247composite: UT 11/ A&M 12

Basically UT is just about border-line top-10, but A&M is pretty much NOT. What was funny was the attempt to establish the "top-10" idea in that tweet. It would look funny if it was done for UT too, though the UT class actually is a top-10 class in 3 of the 4 services' rankings, rivals being the outlier.

A&M simply didn't get players they badly needed at some key positions. That's why the class is poor in my opinion. Sumlin lost so much time trying to keep guys he should never have had wavering (Murray, Mack) that he couldn't take care of business in the end, probably.
 
The rivals rank shows the aggys with more total points but UT has a higher avg, points per recruit.
 
I smell an aggy boycott of all of the media recruiting gurus and sources that did the polling. Poor aggy!
 
Some of the stuff aggies say or claim is really laughable. I tried to think like them to see where they are coming from and damn near got an aneurysm.
 
Not to even mention that Murray may never set foot on campus if he gets a huge bonus offer from MLB as many expect this summer. How far does their ranking fall if that happens?
 
Someone forgot to tell The Dallas News. Headline on page 10C this morning - Aggies Retain State Bragging Rights. They base this on the fact that aggy and Texas signed the same number of Texas players (they do not count the grayshirt), but aggy finished higher in Rivals' ranking.
 
For some reason, people still put more weight on the rivals rankings. Actually it is because they are the oldest service. But over the last so many years, it has been very clear that the rivals rankings were often very poor. Highly skewed towards having some top-75 playmakers. Then it gets worse because they rank the players also poorly.

All these services' rankings should be taken as just an indicator of quality and nothing more. None of them make any attempt to look at filling team needs (they can't) and that is an awfully important item. Something that the previous staff was unable to address well because of the nature of their recruiting, and it's something that Charlie was extremely careful of, all along, even at Loiuisville (just look at him focusing so hard on getting a couple of DTs immediately after joining us last year).

If you take Duvonte Lampkin and Gilbert Johnson out and replace them with Jamabo and Lodge, we would be ranked some 3 spots up. We would be worse team, no doubt, had we done that! DT Lampkin was a recruit we just could not afford to lose in this class. Now if we replaced Lampkin with Mack, the ranking bump would be legitimate.

Let us say aggy had picked up Locksley, Gilbert Johnson, and Cherry, Townsend (two 4-stars and two 3-stars) instead of Murray, WR Antwan Kirk, and ILB Riley Garner and OLB Dwayne Thomas (two 5-stars, two 3-stars). They would be ranked at least a couple of spots lower, but in my opinion they would have picked up better payers for their needs. Murray and Kirk were not what aggy had desperate need for. They have a very good QB that Kyler isn't expected to replace for a year or two (but needed one more decent dual-threat QB for some depth, so Locks would be enough), and they are loaded at WR, but they are hurting at LB and they did not fix the issue at all. Picking LBs ranked below national top-1000 like Garner and Thomas is like wasting spots on the team, barring miracles.

Aggy just didn't do a good job in addressing their issues. We did a much better job at it. Still, I would straight-up trade a higher ranked WR/ATH Deandre McNeal for a lower ranked DT Kingsley Keke they took, and be happier, even though I think the world of the talent Deandre brings, as a unique playmaker. It is just on the basis of needs at the DT position. One more DT and maybe one more higher ranked OL would have made our team perfect (losing Weathersby at OL hurt). Rankings don't matter in these things.

We should just look at the team needs more carefully than recruiting services' rankings. If you are filling the spots of need with nobodies, that is not great either, but if you are plugging in national top-600 guys at every spot, you are doing a tremendous job. That is what Charlie is doing. Really building a complete team rather than look at numbers in the top-150 which skew rankings a lot. Sure, we should go after the top ones too, but the rest should also be players of potential. The quality of the bottom half of a class is hardly reflected in the rankings at the top-15 level.
 
^^ Just to add to it, 26 of the 28 players we picked up are at around national top-600 or higher. Only about 18 or 19 of the 25 aggy picked up are at that level. That is an extra 7 more "players" that we signed up. And when you look at which spots these potential deadwood players are at, aggy has some 4 of them at LB itself. That is a problem. When the DB position is also a bit iffy (though in a better shape than LB), you have problems on defense that may not go away too fast for aggy. Tough to see wretched crew becoming the old wrecking crew all that quickly.

Why am I spending my time thinking about aggy, anyway?
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I believe that one of Mack's main problems was we did not have well rounded classes.

The last really good tight end we had was Finley. How many years has he been gone.

The last highly rank RB was Charles until we got Gray.

Those gaps are really too long

I am leaving out OL, which has been a major problem.
 
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