SEC teams with best, worst efforts in recruiting based on previous 5-year trends

By now, you’ve probably read and heard every angle to how teams recruited in relation to their own conferences and the nation as a whole.

But it’s time for those teams to look in the mirror and see how they performed based on the standards they set for themselves over the previous five years.

Were they able to lower the bar or did they raise it with their 2017 classes?

The formula we’re using to answer this question is simple: For each SEC team, take their average national ranking over the previous 5 years (2012-16) and subtract that from their national ranking for 2017.

We used 247Sports’ composite rankings in this story.

WORST

I know what you’re thinking. It’s got to be Ole Miss, right? Wrong. OK, they’ve got to be second-worst then, right? Wrong again.

The poor got poorer this recruiting cycle, and that was solidified on National Signing Day as Vanderbilt — the SEC school that recruited the worst over the previous handful of years (average national ranking of 43.8), still managed to underperform itself more than any team in the league, and by a wide margin.

Vanderbilt failed to get a commitment from a 4-star player in this year’s class, mostly filling its crop of 19 players with 17 3-stars.

You have to go all the way back to Robbie Caldwell’s only year in Nashville (2010) to find the last time the Commodores didn’t get a commitment from a 4-star player.

Also, what Vandy didn’t get in quality, they didn’t make up for in quantity. The Commodores’ class is the smallest in the SEC, at least four fewer than any other team.

The school’s national ranking of 64th is the worst by any SEC team since Vandy’s 2009 class ranked 69th.

What about Missouri? The last time the Tigers had a class ranked this low they were a year away from competing in the SEC.

One of the head-scratching aspects of Mizzou’s 2017 class was its lack of Missourians. This year’s crop only has one player from The Show Me State, and that’s 3-star ATH Daron Davis out of Hogan Preparatory Academy in Kansas City.

Missouri had signed a total of 37 in-state players over the previous five years, averaging more than seven per class. In 2013, 11 of the 21 incoming Tigers were from the state.

Then, there’s Ole Miss. According to 247Sports’ rankings, the last time a school with a top 10 class dropped to No. 30 or lower came in 2008, when both South Carolina (No. 36 from No. 7) and Tennessee (No. 34 from No. 3) experienced similar stumbles.

And 2017 marks just the third time since the turn of the century that Ole Miss has ranked among the three worst teams in recruiting. The other years came in 2000 and 2012, Hugh Freeze’s first year in Oxford.

BEST

Not many SEC teams exceeded their own benchmark. Interestingly, only three of the 14 schools earned a national ranking that was higher than their previous five-year average.

In 2013, Kentucky coach Mark Stoops took over a team that went 2-10 in Joker Phillips’ last season in Lexington. Since then, the Wildcats have slowly improved and are coming off their first winning season since 2009 and first bowl appearance since 2010.

Kentucky’s 29th-ranked class for 2017 is just the third since 2000 (2000, 2014) to crack the top 30, two of those now coming under Stoops.

The ‘Cats reeled in four 4-star recruits, three of them from the state of Ohio — ATH Lynn Bowden, WR JaVonte Richardson, ATH Tyrell Ajian — to go with DE Joshua Paschal from Maryland.

UK has clearly come a long way from its class at the start of this timeframe in 2012 that ranked 50th, which was last in the conference.

Fans in Athens have plenty to be proud of with their haul. Georgia has been one of the most consistently good schools when it comes to recruiting, if not the most consistent going back to the turn of the century, inking a top 10 class nearly every year.

The previous five years saw the Bulldogs recruit at a high level: 8th in 2012, 12th in 2013, 8th in 2014, 5th in 2015, 8th in 2016. Still, Kirby Smart and the Bulldogs have the No. 3 class in the land for 2017.

For UGA, a school that averaged a top 10 class over the last five years, to outperform that by a little over five spots is pretty impressive. The Dawgs’ group includes 20 players rated as a 5-star or 4-star, which is third-most in the nation behind Alabama (24) and Michigan (21).

Mississippi State saw a marginal increase, but that’s also a victory for MSU, which hit the trail coming off just its second losing season on Dan Mullen’s watch, the other one coming in his first season in Starkville (2009).

Despite that, four 4-star recruits chose Hail State, including two big gets on National Signing Day in LB Willie Gay and RB Kylin Hill.

Plus, how often does Mississippi State outrecruit Ole Miss? This cycle marked just the second time in the last 14 years that MSU did that.