Blue-Chip Ratio 2022: The 15 teams who can actually win a national title
ByBUD ELLIOTT Jul 13, 10:25Winning a national championship in college football requires a lot of things. It takes coaching, luck, timing, scheduling, and yes, talent.
Sometimes, the most talented team in college football is the champion. Sometimes, it’s a lesser-talented team. But what is the minimum level of talent needed to win it all? That’s a potentially evolving question of interest every year.
I track that minimum required level of recruiting necessary to win a title and publish the teams who have met the standard annually in Blue-Chip Ratio. Since its inception in 2013 it’s been referenced on all the major broadcast networks and referred to by head coaches. It’s not the most complicated calculation in the world, but it’s a great way to figure out the top 10 percent or so of the teams in the sport which can actually take home the title.
So, what is the minimum level of recruiting required to win it all?Put simply, to win the national championship, college football teams need to sign more four- and five-star recruits (AKA “Blue Chips”) than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes.
This has been true basically as far back as modern internet recruiting rankings have existed.
Media will sometimes hype a team which has not met the threshold as a national title contender, but history has shown that is not a smart practice. Think Wisconsin, Baylor, Michigan State, TCU, Utah, Cincinnati, etc. over the last decade. Even the Bearcats, who made last season's College Football Playoff, were really no match for a blue-chip-built team like Alabama.
This is a necessary but not sufficient condition. It does not guarantee a national championship, but a team not meeting it is almost certainly guaranteed not to win it all.The requirement to stack talent on top of talent makes sense when considering the violence of the sport of football. Even those teams who stay relatively healthy need depth to survive the season. Teams who sign elite class after elite class have greater competition in practice, and greater quality of depth.
Recruiting rankings are not perfect. But they are damn good, especially in the aggregate. Four- and five-star recruits are about 10 times more likely to be drafted in the first round than their two- and three-star counterparts. And five-stars are about 33 times more likely to be All-Americans as two-stars are. For every two-star who becomes a big success, there are multiples who will be going pro in something other than sports. And they are getting better annually due to advancements in technology and data.
That is not to say that development does not matter. It certainly does. But nobody wins a national title by player development in lieu of elite recruiting. Plenty of coaches who are regarded as elite have never sniffed winning it all because they cannot accumulate enough talent. On the other hand, there are examples of coaches who are not regarded as premier head men who have won it all thanks to elite recruits. Not to lump them into the same category, but nobody ever accused Gene Chizik, Les Miles, Mack Brown, or Ed Orgeron of being tactical masterminds.
Coaching matters. But recruiting is by far the most important piece when it comes to separating the good from the great.
“HOW HAS THIS STAT PERFORMED IN THE PAST?”
- In 2021, Georgia had an 80 percent BCR and won it all, beating the No. 1 BCR team Alabama in the title game. Three of the four playoff teams were BCR teams as Cincinnati was the first crasher since 2017.
- In 2020, Alabama had an 83 percent BCR and won it all. All four Playoff teams were BCR schools.
- In 2019, LSU won it with a 64 percent BCR, and all four Playoff teams were BCR schools.
- Clemson, with a 61 percent mark, took it home in 2018. And all four Playoff teams were BCR schools.
- Alabama won it all in 2017 with an incredible 80 percent mark.
- Clemson took home the title in 2016 after signing 52 percent blue chips in the 2013-16 classes.
- In 2015, Alabama had a 77 percent mark.
- In 2014, it was Ohio State at 68 percent.
- In 2013, Florida State was at 53 percent.
- In 2012, Alabama was at 71 percent ...
- ... just as Bama was in 2011.
The pool of players considered.All high school and JUCO scholarship signees count. Walk-ons are not singees, so they do not. Besides, they are almost never rated.
Sticking with signees helps to standardize the process. If a player signs, is released from his National Letter of Intent, and signs with a new school, as opposed to transferring, I count that player toward the new school.
If a player signs with a school and is unable to enroll and must go to JUCO, he still counts because the school used one of its Letters of Intent (LOI) on him.
I use the 247Sports Composite, which blends the major rankings.
I manually check each signee in each class for accuracy. Some team sites years ago erroneously listed walk-ons as signees. Removing non-scholarship players and verifying signing lists is by far the most time-consuming element.
But what about transfers?Last year on transfers I wrote:
“Transfers are not counted. Transfers (not junior college) are not governed by the same recruit rules. And though they’re important, they are rarely consequential enough to turn a non-contender into a contender. More on transfers and the evolution of the BCR will be coming soon.”
The second part of that is still true. Through two years of heavy transfer portal activity, national titles are not being won through the portal. Teams loading up on transfers are frequently coaches looking for a jumpstart to a new tenure, or, on the other end, looking for a fix to save their jobs.
But with each passing year, transfers are becoming more ubiquitous within the sport of college football, thanks to the removal of the year-in-residence requirement, opening the door for immediate eligibility. There were more than 1500 scholarship transfers this offseason alone.
247Sports has recognized and reacted to the explosion of transfers, debuting the most comprehensive transfer ratings in the industry. We have multiple full-time staff, including some who have worked for college football personnel offices, working on our transfer ratings. And, important to me if I was going to include transfers in the Blue-Chip Ratio, the proportion of blue-chip ratings given out relative to two- or three-star ratings is consistent with the grades assigned to high school and JUCO recruits.
But what I do not know is how those grades will look when evaluated by the NFL draft. I have that data for years and years of high school recruits.
Since the BCR is a historical standard, I will monitor the data over several years and then make a determination as to how it is incorporated into the BCR. I will also provide a graphic of how the BCR looks if transfers were incorporated later in this article, and the results might surprise you.
LET'S GET TO THE 2022 LIST
There should not be too many surprises about who is on the list. Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Texas, LSU, Clemson, Notre Dame, Florida, Oregon, Michigan, Penn State, Miami, and Auburn are all teams who consistently recruit at the top of the sport.
Texas A&M went from ninth to fifth in one year.
Who is missing?You may wonder where some teams who have been on the list in the past are hanging out. USC, Tennessee, and potentially North Carolina are one excellent class away from joining, or re-joining the list.
Former members Washington, Florida State, and Stanford are all multiple good classes away, in theory.
Conference superiority
The SEC leads the way with with six teams. The Big Ten is next, with three. The ACC has two, the Big 12 has two, while the Pac-12 has one. The Group of 5 has zero, and nobody close.
But if you consider that Texas and Oklahoma are going to the SEC, and that frequent list member USC is headed to the Big Ten, the landscape looks different. There is no team in the Big 12 not named Oklahoma or Texas who is even three strong classes away from joining the list. And without USC, Oregon is likely to be alone in the Pac-12 at the top of the recruiting list for a while to come.
We are seeing more super teamsIn 2014, no team was above 75 percent. In 2015, only Alabama was. In 2016 and 2017, it was still just Alabama. The 2018 BCR saw Ohio State get into that super elite class.
This year, there are still three teams over that number. But note that Oklahoma and Texas A&M are also over the 70 percent mark. The BCR has never featured five teams above seventy percent.
Oh, and Alabama, which set the all-time record for the highest BCR in 2021, smashed its own record in 2022, at an incredible 89.4 percent!
Are super teams making it tougher for others to join the club?
As detailed above, there just aren’t any teams threatening to crash the party.
The days of discussing whether teams like South Carolina, Ole Miss, Michigan State, or TCU can make a jump into the upper tier of talent have been shelved. Those teams were winning a lot and scoring some wins against the college football goliaths in the early and mid-2010s, which left us to wonder if they could turn wins into a few more elite recruits.
But for a variety of reasons it did not happen. And further, not many schools have stepped up to take their places. It stands to reason that the very best of schools filling the bottom of their classes with elite players means the third-tier schools are not able to get as many.
But very talented, non-super teams do still win it all with the right recipe.
Of course, being that much higher than 50 percent does not necessarily follow with corresponding extra success. LSU in 2019 won it all at 64 percent, and Clemson in 2018 took home the title with a 61 percent BCR. The Tigers of 2016 were 52 percent in BCR. I’ll never argue that more talent is worse, but the BCR is focused on the bare minimum level needed.
NIL could change the calculus
“The Bengals and Lions still sign free agents,” a coach recently said, analoging NIL and how NFL franchises in cities not seen as nice as some other cities still manage to get good players, simply by paying more. This is definitely something which could spread the wealth around.
Take, for example, a player in the Top247. He might be the 18th-ranked player in the class of one of the super-elite teams, and receive $25,000 annually. Or, potentially, he could be one of the five best players in a third-tier SEC team’s class hellbent on winning and make close to six figures annually. If this becomes more frequent, it could thin things out a bit, in theory.
“Do you think the BCR club’s championship monopoly will hold up forever?”No. At some point a team with maybe a high 40s number, a transcendent QB, and great injury luck will bust this. It’s bound to happen. This almost happened in 2014 with Oregon and Marcus Mariota. An extremely talented Cincinnati team with a record nine players drafted made the CFB Playoff but was two wins away from winning it all.
Please note: This should not be used to pick games
This is simply a way to pare down the list of potential national championship teams. Betting on a team outside the Blue-Chip Ratio to win it all is a pretty bad bet, as history has shown.
But using the Blue-Chip Ratio to pick individual games is also a bad bet. It is simply not designed for that purpose. The only purpose is to say which teams have recruited well enough to win a national championship.
Some teams simply do not have a shot of signing elite prospects and must instead find diamonds in the rough. That’s a strategy that can produce wins and conference titles, though perhaps not Playoff rings. And those teams absolutely can beat teams who recruit well in one-off settings. The Playoff, however, is not a one-off.
So use the BCR to narrow down your list of who could win it all. Don’t use it to bet on games.
FINALLY, LET’S LOOK AT THE BCR WITH THE TRANSFERS
First, the very best teams are not significantly improving their BCR with transfers, at least through one year of complete transfer ratings. Alabama signed three top-10 transfers per 247Sports and only went up 1 percent. Looking at the chart, you see a lot of red.
53COMMENTS
Does that feel right? I think so. It is comforting to see that it is not inflating their BCR numbers. And it is consistent with the idea that many transfers are taken for depth or to fill holes.
Second, only one team would have changed – and it’s not USC. It’s actually Miami, which would go from 55 percent to 49. USC, for all the hype that its transfer class received (and deservedly so), it actually would go down slightly as only seven members of its huge transfer class were rated as four- or five-stars.
Again, does it seem right that USC’s BCR would go down given the Trojans signed the No. 1 class of transfers in 2022? This is another example of why more research is needed into how to correctly incorporate transfers into the BCR.
