Georgia finished first in the recruiting rankings in the 2018 class. Expect the Bulldogs to be right at the top in 2019, too. DawgNation’s Jeff Sentell will answer a Recruiting Question of the Day on Tuesday and Thursday. You can ask him your questions on Twitter or the DawgNation Message board forum. Previous QODs can be found on our question of the day archives page. 

QUESTION OF THE DAY

DawgNation message board user @Red_N_Black asks: Jeff, at some point could you go into a little detail about exactly which recruiting ranking services that the 247Sports composite is comprised of? Also, while I know that the 247 composite is generally the rating most used, do you feel that there is one of these services that has historically been more accurate in ranking these prospects than the composite itself?

Good question. It underscores the baseline of the entire recruiting rankings process.

The skinny here is the 247Sports composite is what I like to call a gumbo of all the mainstream recruiting services. It was a cool innovation. Why? Because beauty is usually in the eye of the beholder. Opinions will vary. Some service will like their guys more than others.

I can also neither universally confirm nor deny that other factors such as where a recruit is a “guy” for a certain service might ever sway the rankings even just a tiny bit. There are underlying factors there where certain rankings services are aligned with specific All-American games and the like. But that is a blog topic for another day. Or maybe that will never be a blog topic.

The main thing here is that the evaluation and rankings from 247Sports, ESPN, Rivals and Scout sometimes align. Sometimes they do not.

What 247Sports did is come up with a unique algorithm that blends the rankings together and comes up with a composite or an average ranking. 247Sports has an explainer that also covers this in pristine detail.

In short, the 247Sports composite rankings exists to remove bias. Or at least even it out. I think it does that as well as any other recruiting currency that is currently in use.

The recent acquisition of Scout by 247Sports does muddy these waters somewhat. The more voices, the better that composite standard has a chance of hitting closest to the mark. As for my thoughts, I feel that 247Sports does an exemplary job with its rankings. I feel that Barton Simmons is one of the best in the field when it comes to that. He really puts in the work to see all of these guys. I really respect that.

A recruiting analyst such as Simmons needs to do his homework and the best way to do that is to show up and meticulously chart and take notes and get the film of all the “good on good” sessions at all these showcase camps.

That should answer that question. I’ll also use this topic to share the recent rankings movement for the UGA commits and several of their key targets. The composite has shifted on some guys based of some recent rankings from the early evaluation prospect camps for the 2019 cycle.

UGA commits 

Big UGA targets for 2019