Rivals Rankings at 20: Cats get big bang out of their recruiting buck

MORE: Rivals Rankings at 20: How Power Five programs have ranked in recruiting

Rivals is a running a Rivals Rankings at 20 series commemorating the 20th anniversary of the networks ubiquitous rankings. Last week, they ran a piece ranking all Power Five programs according to their average finish in the team rankings.

The sobering bottom line: Northwestern came in dead-last, 65th out of 65 programs. We knew that the Wildcats would be low, but riding the caboose on the Power Five train was a bit of a surprise.

The facts are what they are. Rivals took the final rankings of each class over the last 20 years and averaged them. Northwestern’s 62.25 ranking means that the Wildcats’ class finished, on average, in 62nd place out of all FBS teams (about 130) each year. Next lowest was Indiana, at 62.1.

So, what does it all mean? Here are a few lessons learned.

We’ve written about this countless times before, but Rivals rankings inadvertently penalize the Wildcats for having smaller classes. Northwestern has one of the lowest attrition rates in the country -- virtually all of their players graduate and very few leave the program voluntarily. Therefore, they bring in fewer recruits each year.

You can read all about the team rankings formula, but it works like this: Each recruit gets a numerical value according to his star rating: a five-star gets 6.1 points, a four-star gets 5.8 to 6.0, and so on. The ratings are then converted to points: 6.1 = 150 points, 6.0 = 135 points, 5.9 = 120 points, etc. Then, on top of that, each recruit gets bonus points according to his Rivals250 ranking: the No. 1 player gets 100 points, No. 25 55, No. 50 45, and on down the line.

Where Northwestern gets hurt is that Rivals counts the points for the first 20 players in each class and expresses it as a total. So if you have, say, 16 members, like NU’s 2021 class does, you miss all of those potential points that four more recruits would have added.

The Wildcats have had 20 members in a class just seven times in 20 years. So, in all those other years, 13 of 20, the Wildcats were essentially playing with a hand tied behind their back. If they went by, say, average star rankings instead of points, Northwestern's classes would rank much higher.

Northwestern’s highest ranking over the last 20 years was 46th in 2016. Not surprisingly, that was a year the Wildcats brought in 20 recruits.

Here are the Wildcats' recruiting classes and rankings in the Rivals era.

This has also been dissected six ways to Sunday over the years, but recruiting rankings are, at best, an inexact science. Sometimes, they have no bearing to how a player performs on the field at the college level.

Take Northwestern’s 2014 class, for example. That class was probably the school’s finest over the last 20 years. The Wildcats brought in four four-star prospects that year for the first and still only time in head coach Pat Fitzgerald’s tenure. Two of them were Clayton Thorson and Justin Jackson, who turned into the school’s all-time leading passer and rusher, respectively. A third, tight end Garrett Dickerson, played for the New York Giants. (The fourth four-star, Parrker Westphal, battled injuries throughout his NU career and never made an impact.)

Another class member, three-star Solomon Vault, was voted the school’s best kick returner over the last 25 years by WildcatReport readers. Nine members of the 2014 class were multi-year starters. Five of them played in the NFL: Thorson, Jackson, Dickerson, Blake Hance and Nate Hall.

That was a wildly successful class by any measure. Yet, because that class only had 15 signees, it finished just 67th in the team rankings that year. That’s the lowest ranked Northwestern class over the last 10 years and the seventh-lowest in 20 years.

If, however, the classes had been ranked by average star rating instead of the Rivals points system, the Wildcats' 2014 class would've come in at No. 28 in the nation that cycle.

In other words, take these rankings with a grain -- or maybe a barrel -- of salt.

Football is measured by wins and losses, not recruiting rankings. So perhaps the best measure of a coaching staff is how well they do on the field with the talent they assemble.

In that regard, Fitzgerald and the Wildcats are among the best in the nation.

Northwestern is the only school with a winning record among the schools ranked 53rd to 65th in the rankings. Look at how the Wildcats compare to the other schools ranked in the 60s. They are the only one with a record above .500, and they've had more winning seasons, bowl games and AP Top 25 finishes than all of the others.

Maybe the best comparisons are the other Big Ten schools Northwestern plays almost every year, and who play largely the same schedules year-in and year-out. Again, the Wildcats have outplayed several of the conference foes who were ranked above them in recruiting.

Among the schools that have been in the conference for all 20 years, they've been objectively better than No. 64 Indiana, No. 57 Purdue, No. 51 Illinois and No. 48 Minnesota. You have to go all the way up to No. 40 Iowa to find a Big Ten program that has outperformed the Wildcats on the field over the last two decades.