2018’s CFB teams whose results most differed from recruiting rankings

This post is a collection of the college football teams whose four-year recruiting ranking (going off the 247Sports Composite) most differed from their 2018 finish in S&P+, the opponent-adjusted advanced stat developed by SB Nation’s Bill Connelly. Recruiting rankings are generally predictive at the overall level, but there will always be lots of variances on a team-by-team basis.

S&P+ isn’t meant to be a stand-in for won/loss record, but we like it as a baseline measurement of a team’s down-to-down performance and true caliber. Here’s who was way better than they were supposed to be, who was way worse, and who was pretty much exactly the same.

Why eight? Because that’s a natural cutoff based on the pure rankings differences for all the teams. Context follows below.

There’s almost a perfect line in the recruiting world between Power 5 teams and Group of 5 teams. That leads to this list being exclusively Power 5, because those teams have the longest way to fall unless they’re Kansas State Purdue, Boston College, or Kansas.

FSU has declined badly, though Willie Taggart has plenty of pieces in place to make things better soon. Louisville lost Lamar freaking Jackson and couldn’t deal with its other attrition without him. UCLA has had a lot of weird recruiting misses under Chip Kelly, but the Bruins also had a lot of turnover heading into the year, with Josh Rosen being the most impactful loss. Tennessee had fallen apart by the end of Butch Jones’ tenure.

North Carolina had a bunch of players suspended for long stretches, contributing to its badness. Oregon State, Arkansas, and Rutgers were just bad Power 5 teams who got waxed so thoroughly that they fell to near the bottom in S&P+.

The biggest Group of 5 underachievers by these metrics were UTSA (89th in recruiting, 126th in S&P+, 3-9 record), San Jose State (88th, 125th, 3-9), East Carolina (80th, 110th, 3-9), and nation’s-worst-team UConn (101st, 130th, 1-11).

Again, let’s start with the numbers and contextualize later.

This whole list is comprised of awesome Group of 5 teams, which is again owed to the vast recruiting gulf between the powers and the non-powers. Obviously, it’s more than fair to consider UCF a bigger overachiever for almost going undefeated the second year in a row than Ohio was for putting together a nice MAC season. But in terms of punching above their weight classes, nobody did a better job in 2018 than this group.

The biggest Power 5 overachievers were Syracuse (59th in recruiting, 36th in S&P+, a 10-3 record), Iowa (44th, 22nd, 9-4), Virginia (58th, 37th, 8-5), and Utah (36th, 16th, 9-5).

Arbitrarily, this means teams whose four-year recruiting rank and S&P+ finish were within three spots of each other. I’m not putting them in any particular order:

Congrats to these programs for being relentlessly themselves. To answer one question I had myself, Clemson’s not here because the Tigers are No. 6 in four-year recruiting and No. 2 in S&P+. The computers like Alabama by a smidgen in a hypothetical rematch at a neutral site.