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What updated ‘blue-chip ratio’ says about Georgia football in 2022 season
One of the most important pieces of information in terms of identifying championship-caliber teams dropped on Wednesday, as Bud Elliott of 247Sports published the annual ‘Blue-Chip Ratio’.
The ratio is what percentage of your roster is made up of blue-chip recruits, or 4-or 5-star prospects. With Georgia being one of the best-recruiting programs in the country under Kirby Smart, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Bulldogs have the No. 3 blue-chip ratio in the country at 77 percent.
That’s a slight drop from a season ago, when Georgia had an 80 percent mark. In the grand scheme of things, that difference is negligible. The Bulldogs still exceed the 50 percent mark, which every champion of the College Football Playoff and late-era BCS has done. In the age of modern recruiting rankings, if you’re going to win it all, over half of your roster needs to come with elite recruiting rankings.
Georgia signed the No. 3 ranked recruiting class last season. The three before that saw Georgia finish fourth, first and second. As it stands right now, Georgia has the No. 9 class. Of the 13 commits, 10 are blue-chip prospects which comes out to 77 percent. With plenty of top targets out there still for the Bulldogs, Georgia is going to remain above the blue-chip threshold for the foreseeable future.
Related: Raylen Wilson commitment continues epic linebacker recruiting run for Georgia football
As for the rest of college football, there are some noteworthy trends. Alabama once again has the nation’s highest blue-chip ratio. But whereas it was 84 percent a season ago, this year a staggering 89 percent of their roster is made up of blue-chip recruits. That is the highest number ever.
Sandwiched between the two SEC powers is Ohio State at 80 percent. While not everyone values recruiting the same, it probably isn’t a coincidence that the three teams who have a blue-chip ratio over 75 percent are the three best betting favorites to win it all this season.
Rounding out the top-5 are Oklahoma and Texas A&M, who both cracked 70 percent for the first time. This is the first season in which five teams have a total higher tha 70 percent.
In total there are 15 teams who exceed the blue-chip threshold. Georgia faces three of them in the 2022 season, with Florida at 60 percent, Oregon at 60 percent and Auburn at 54 percent. The Bulldogs could very well end up seeing Alabama or Texas A&M in the SEC championship game come December, as Georgia and Alabama are the favorites to win their respective decisions.
As Elliott stresses, this group is not a ranking of the 15 best teams. Cincinnati proved just last season that you can still reach the College Football Playoff, even if you don’t make this list. Now, the Bearcats also had nine players taken in the 2022 NFL Draft and still got easily snuffed out by Alabama in the College Football Playoff, but the Bearcats were a very good team last season.
Georgia’s inclusion on this list perhaps best represents Smart’s thinking on program building. You need to amass an overwhelming amount of talent if you’re going to compete for championships. Having so much talent helps you weather injuries, bad evaluations and gives you a wider margin of error compared to lesser programs.
But it also perfectly illustrates how you stacking your roster compared to other programs. Georgia has to keep signing insane recruiting classes if it is going to keep itself in the same ballpark as Alabama.
After Georgia beat Florida this past season, Smart spent part of his post-game press conference speaking about the importance of recruiting. Florida’s coach at the time, Dan Mullen, had developed a reputation of not being all that invested in recruiting. It came back to bite him as Mullen’s time at Florida came to an end quickly after the 34-10 defeat to Georgia.
Florida of course is still on this list and in theory, has enough talent to make a championship run. But the Gators needed several breaks to go their way just to get to that point in 2020. Then at the end of the year, Florida unraveled, losing their final three games.
When you recruit at the level Smart has, you’re putting yourself in a position every single season to not need a half-a-dozen breaks to be a serious championship contender.
“If you don’t recruit, there’s no coach out there who can out-coach recruiting,” Smart said. “I don’t care who you are. The best coach to ever play the game better be a good recruiter because no coaching is going to out-coach players. That’s 25% evaluation, 50% recruiting, and the other 25% is coaching. If you don’t recruit, guys, you’ve got no chance.”
Most teams in college football don’t have a chance of winning the National Championship. Georgia is one of the few, with its recruiting being a big reason why that is the case. For every Jordan Davis or AD Mitchell that Georgia has unearthed, the Bulldogs teams having more Travon Walker and George Pickens-type players is why Georgia has so often been one of the best teams in the country under Smart.
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