re: SEC Football Recent Recruiting Trends Analysis

The NFL is the standard of football at the highest level. If a team who pays alot of money to scouts and players feels good enough to draft a guy, when they'll turn around a couple days later and sign 10 more as free agents, then guys getting drafted and how that related to a recruting class or their star rating 4 or 5 years prior is interesting to evaluate.

If you really get serious about evaluating some draft stats, I'll tell you something very interesting about Arkansas. Nutt's detractors would tell you he's a poor recruiter who can only win on luck, or the prior coaches recruits b/c that is what he's done at 2 sec programs now. They think Danny Ford was a great recruiter b/c Nutt tied for the west in 98 with Ford's players. However, if you take away the first class that basically each coach had to rebuild or contain once he was hired, and look at their first full class, year 2, Nutt actually put more of his recruits in the draft than Ford. twice, Nutt had 6 of his recruits drafted the same year. The most Ford ever had was 5 but typically 1 or 2. Ford routinely won 10+ games at Clemson and is their all time winningest coach so obviously by Ark standards he is an agreed upon quality recruiter.

The real kicker is, players brought in in the Ford era were being overpaid by a Dallas truck operator. Ford was cheating, Nutt paid the price for Ford's cheating with sanctions and a 3 year cloud, AND STILL OUT RECRUITED HIM.

I can only imagine what a big time recruiter like Nutt could do in a saturated area like north central MS.