Quick Recap

Hello friends. This blog is a bit of a sequel to the tweets that I put out last week regarding Auburn's recruiting toward the end of Malzahn's tenure. This is the tweet below, and here's the link, just so we're all on the same page.

"I’ve talked about on the podcast how Auburn’s recruiting went sooo downhill in Malzahn’s last few years: ‘18, ‘19, ‘20 recruiting classes. This is 2020 in the photo. Look at our WR, RB, & QB board We got 2 of these guys out of our top 30-40 targets. We also eventually moved Ashford below the line. If you wanna know why Hugh Freeze is in such a massive rebuild, it’s because Harsin inherited a really bad football team, which only got worse, and then Hugh inherited maybe the least talented team in the SEC at the time besides Vandy."

I also had a picture of Auburn's recruiting board that was taken back in 2019 when I was on staff. Side note, I didn't take those pictures with the goal of posting them later - I took it because that board was located upstairs in the conference room / war room, and I often needed to keep our digital board up-to-date with this one, so taking pictures and then referencing them on my phone was incredibly more efficient than walking up and down the stairs a million times. Cool, moving on.

Many people took issue with me stating that Auburn was in the same category as Vanderbilt in terms of talent when the Composite Recruiting Rankings and other rankings sites have Auburn labeled as 9th, 10th, blah blah blah. I'd like to provide a fairly simple example of why you can't look at those rankings and blindly trust that they have any significance at all, using the 2016 signing class as the example.

The Proof

2019 was my third year working for the Auburn Football program in the player personnel capacity, and I was growing dissatisfied with our recruiting efforts by the day. Recruiting DOMINATES your life in CFB. There's no way around it - not yet, at least. So you spend all this time scouting, recruiting, hosting, messaging, nurturing all these recruits & relationships.

Well, I was watching the product we were putting on the field, and I was listening to people inside our building complain about us not being talented at certain positions. But, I hadn't seen any documents that take an in-depth look back at the recruiting classes over the previous few years to determine what we got right or wrong. In my head, it was obvious that you have to look retrospectively to understand where you missed, so that you can improve moving forward. I decided to take on a task without really asking anyone for permission, and thankfully it gained some traction.

Take a look at this Google Sheet that I made that contains every player we signed in the 2016 class. If I were you, I would right click and open it in a new tab, so you can read alongside the list. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s80jOKU1QlMHDgsyNi-sgBv7EODHCgZU/edit?gid=1895495394#gid=1895495394

Notice that 10 out of 22 players from the 2016 class were already gone from the team before the 2019 season even started. This was ranked the 9th overall class in the country by 247 Sports, and I'm looking at those 10 players plus 4-5 other guys on that roster who were essentially non-contributors. That means 14 out of 22 players were what we would call a "miss". 14 misses out of 22 in a class is inexcusable.
-(Nate-Craig is a partial exception because he played a decent amount in 2017, but even still he was an average SEC player. No offense, Nate).

The Result

Once I had created the signing class review for the 2015-2019 classes, I felt as though there was plenty supporting evidence that there was a problem. I decided to show our Director of Recruiting and let him do with that information whatever he wanted. He was a bold guy, so he decided to have it printed out for all 10 assistant coaches. In short, they were umm... displeased. The coaches started making excuses and giving tons of reasons why guys didn't qualify or had to be kicked off, why they transferred, etc., and they were mad at my boss for even putting it on their desk. Keep in mind, this is long before the days of open transfers. At this time, you could only sign 25 recruits per class, so every recruit you signed had much more significant implications to the health/talent of your roster.

Clearly, we struck a chord with the coaches, even though all I did was print out facts on a sheet. You can dress it up however you want to, but the truth is that there were VERY FEW real contributors on a "Top Ten Class". There are very few guys on that sheet that you feel confident are going to win their matchup in the SEC. 2016 was not a one-off occurrence. This was the beginning of a really bad spell of recruiting and evaluation, and this example goes to show why Auburn's roster was a dumpster fire at the end of Malzahn's tenure.

I'm not doing this to blast Auburn or to blast anyone in particular, but the state of Auburn Football is very explainable - it's not a mystery. If you consistently sign below average players, you are not going to be a contender in the SEC.

What's next?

I have the rest of the signing classes and the relevant data that I could share. I also have full roster management sheets where we take a look at the 85 scholarship players and evaluate their ability so that we had a full understanding of roster health/talent. I may make it into a podcast mini series - kind of just depends on if people find this interesting or not! Let me know in a comment below or on X!