Heading into the 2016 season, how does one determine the SEC team with the best young talent?
Is it the team with the most members on the most recent SEC All-Freshman team?
Is it the team with the highest average recruiting ranking of the last two seasons?
Is it the team that has signed the most elite high school talent – four-star and five-star recruits – the last two seasons?
The answer to all three questions is one team: Alabama. Any way you slice it, the Crimson Tide has the best young talent entering the ’16 season.
Let’s start with last year’s freshmen. When the SEC’s head coaches voted on the All-Freshman team, Alabama came away with the most players selected: WR Calvin Ridley, LG Ross Pierschbacher, DB Minkah Fitzpatrick and CB Marlon Humphrey.
Ridley and Fitzpatrick were true freshmen, signed in the 2015 recruiting class, ranked No. 1 in the country by the 247Sports composite. The class of ’15 had a whopping five composite five-star signees. The only other SEC school to tally five five-star signees in the last two recruiting classes combined is Georgia. However, Alabama has UGA topped by adding another three five-star signees in ’16 to bring its two-year total to eight.
If you were to qualify the definition of elite talent to include four-star signees along with five-star signees, Alabama is still on top. In the last two classes, Alabama has signed 48 recruits, 37 of them rated composite four-stars or five-stars. The only other SEC teams to crack 30 elite signees in that time period are Auburn (33) and LSU (31).
Crunching recruiting numbers from the last two classes is the most obvious way to compare young talent as it can only include true freshmen, redshirt freshmen and true sophomores. Many members of the class of 2014 will be upperclassmen (true juniors) this fall, but not all ’14 signees are irrelevant from the young talent discussion.
As referenced earlier, only two members (Ridley and Fitzpatrick) of the All-Freshmen team were true freshmen, meaning Pierschbacher and Humphrey will be redshirt sophomores in 2016, still young from a football perspective with three years of eligibility remaining. There’s another key contributor who is only a redshirt sophomore worth mentioning: RB Bo Scarbrough, a former five-star recruit ready to be the next big Bama back (6-foot-2, 230 pounds) who punishes the SEC.
When Alabama lost to Ole Miss in Week 3 last season, a (briefly) popular media narrative became that it was the end of the Alabama dynasty. That theory was lazy, forgetting or wilfully ignoring that UA signed the No. 1 composite class every year from 2011-15. Until the day UA stops signing the best recruits and accumulating the best young talent, the Crimson Tide dynasty will keep on rolling.
Andrew writes about sports to fund his love of live music and collection of concert posters. He strongly endorses the Hall of Fame campaigns of Fred Taylor and Andruw Jones.
