Florida Football Recruiting: The data is clear on who gets a rankings bump

In case you had not heard, Florida football fans were not the happiest campers last week after a number of committed Gators as part of the class of 2024 dropped in the rankings on a certain recruiting service.

But we here at Hail Florida Hail try our best not to deal with hyperbole; we try to use real data.

And when looking at industry data from March rankings and comparing them to current rankings, two clear narratives emerge with who is most likely to get a rankings bump during the summer.

Florida Football: No pads needed

The horse may be dead on this debate, but putting together this database took a little bit of time.

We took the top 247 players as listed in the 247 Composite and simply compared where they were ranked in March and where they are ranked today and noted how much that player moved up or down in the rankings.

We would have done the entire top 300, but it turns out 247 cuts off the history of their rankings after 247 players.

Go figure.

For the purpose of keeping the database stable, we cut off the amount of movement we gave someone credit for at 100 spots. So someone that was ranked in the 400s in March, only to get hot shot into the top 100, only got credit for moving 100 spots in our database.

Also, keep in mind that because this is the Composite, it utilizes data from all the major recruiting services.

Individual Player Movement

Here are the average jumps or dips players currently in the top 247 made from March until now by position:

• QBs – 4.13
• WRs – 20.33
• OLs – 10.20
• TEs – 28.55
• RBs – 21.25

• CBs- 13.48
• S – 6.20s
• DLs – 1.22
• LBs – -7.19
• Ath – 0.39

Notice a pattern here?

Tight ends, running backs, and wide receivers, on average, all made jumps of 20 spots since March, while everyone but cornerbacks on the defensive side of the ball made almost no movement, and linebackers were the only positional group actually to drop on average.

This may seem crazy, but it reveals just how much stock is placed by recruiting services on 7 v 7 camps. You know the style of football where no one gets hit, and linebacker play is non-existent?

That’s what is being used to justify some wild swings in recruiting rankings.

It may look like defensive linemen are also ignored, but in truth, they were subjected to some of the wildest of recruiting swings. Of the 50 defensive linemen in our database set, they had by far the most variance of any group. It seemed like you either got bumped up 100 spots or dropped 100 spots.

The justification for their rankings movement?

Hey, come to our camp.

Are you big?

Cool, rankings bump for you even though we thought your film wasn’t very good four months ago.

Are you smaller than we thought?

Get dropped even though we loved your film four months ago.

Now you might be wondering how it is that every position group except linebackers got a rankings bump and thinking the math doesn’t work out because the median change for all the recruits we looked at was -3. So more recruits in the top 247 actually went down then went up.

But the overall reason for the averages to be so high is that those that got dropped only got dropped a little. Those that got bumped got a crazy bump.

The median change among those that saw any kind of drop was a drop of 19 spots.

The median change among those that saw any kind of bump was a jump of 57 spots.

But Pawl, what about Georgia?

The data is clear that if you are on the offensive side of the ball, you are more prone to get a bump.

But what about getting bumped depending on what team you commit to?

There is a clear difference that players committed anywhere got moved up an average of 10 spots while players still uncommitted moved an average of 5.

But let’s talk about our neighbors to the north. Georgia has 18 players committed in the top 247. Since March, those 18 players have moved up an average of 18.33 spots.

What is the average for a player committed to any school but Georgia?

9.66 spots.

Draw your own conclusions, but…

The average bump Florida football commitments have had since March is 23.67 spots.

Granted, the bulk of that is from Jamota Waller and Amaris Williams, and the median change for Florida commits is only three spots.

But Georgia saw eight of their 18 commits also drop, and their median bump is only 0.5 spots.

What it all means

Recruiting services have a near-impossible job to take 10,000 high school football players and try and accurately rate all of them and determine who is the best.

But they also sell a narrative to readers that these are the players that your favorite college football team is for sure going to want.

And while using camps to verify size and get an up-close look at a prospect to help make further evaluations should be a piece of the puzzle, using these camps to make declarative statements after you already made a declarative statement back in March based on their film seems a bit silly.

Plus, there is an incentive to give guys giant boosts because that turns into content for the various sites to write about.

So while we bicker back and forth about recruiting rankings because we have nothing else to argue about until September, we will repeat what we said last week.

If you trust what you see on film with a Florida football commitment, then at the end of the day, their ranking is nothing more than semantics.