In this article we take a look at basketball recruiting in the ACC over the past four years, and into next year. Recruiting has been a hot topic among Wake Forest fans since Jeff Bzdelik has taken over. So far he has landed three 3-star recruits, but we are in the running for a lot of 2012 4-5 star recruits, and hopefully we will land a couple of them.
Since the Deacs have had a lot of success recently recruiting, I want to see how recruiting 3 star players, as opposed to primarily 4-5 star players could affect us if we do not land the "better players" as judged by the scouts on ESPN, Rivals.com, and Scout.com
- As you can see from the chart, 3-stars are the most prevalent type of recruit that the ACC lands. 4-stars are next, and 5-stars are the rarest. This is exactly what you would expect to find.
- Duke and UNC lead the ACC with six 5-stars in the 5 year period. Boston College, Maryland, Virginia, and Virginia Tech have yet to land a 5-star. Everybody else either has 3 (WFU, NCSU, GT, and FSU) or 1 (Miami, and Clemson).
- Boston College is the only school not to only land 3-stars during the time period.
- As for Wake Forest, we have landed seven 3 and 4 stars a piece to only three 5-stars. All three of those came in the 2008 recruiting class of Al-Farouq Aminu, Tony Woods, and Ty Walker.
If the classes were to be ranked purely on recruiting stars, this is how it would shape up: (the way I did this was to assign 1 point for a 5-star, 2 points for a 4-star, and 3 points for 3-star, then divide by the number of recruits they have had during that time. The lowest average has the best recruiting star-wise during this time).
1. UNC (1.733)
2. Duke (1.812)
3. Georgia Tech (2.076)
4. Florida State (2.157)
5. Wake Forest (2.235)
6. N.C. State (2.375)
7. Clemson (2.642)
8. Maryland (2.647)
9. Miami (2.66)
10. Virginia (2.66)
11. Virginia Tech (2.705)
12. Boston College (3.00)
This essentially makes 4 tiers:
- UNC, Duke
- Georgia Tech, FSU, Wake, State
- Clemson, Maryland, Miami, UVA, VT
- Boston College
This is pretty much what I expected. There could also be sub tiers between GT/FSU, and Wake/NSCU, but you can draw the line where you want to.
Conclusion: My main point was to just take a look at recruiting, and see what kind of correlation there is between recruiting stars and winning. I am going to add records in tomorrow after I get some sleep to see how they stack up. Taking a precursory glance, there is certainly something to be said about recruiting "star players". UNC and Duke have both won national championships in the past 5 years, and GT/Wake/FSU have all seen success as well. I am eager to see how exactly the numbers will stack up, but for now y'all can just chew on these numbers.
Let me know what y'all think about this, and if you have any questions I will be glad to answer them. Comments are always welcome!
