In the MAC, recruiting rankings are a tricky business

Success stories highly unpredictable in Group of Five conference.

By Nicholas Piotrowicz / The Blade
Thu, 14 May 2020 20:08:30 GMT

A December 15 NFL game at Ford Field between Detroit and Tampa Bay became an impromptu Mid-American Conference showcase.

Buccaneers receiver Scott Miller, a Bowling Green graduate, caught his first ever NFL touchdown. Not to be outdone, Central Michigan alumnus Sean Murphy-Bunting sealed the game for Tampa Bay with an interception return for a touchdown.

Further, Northern Illinois' Kenny Golladay caught 3 passes for 44 yards for a Lions team playing without injured quarterback Matthew Stafford, and former Eastern Michigan linebacker Pat O'Connor played 18 snaps as one of the Bucs' special teams regulars.

The four players also had something else in common: Every one of them was a two-star recruit out of high school who had exactly one scholarship offer to an FBS school.

Miller, Golladay, and O'Connor are Illinois natives who were completely ignored by the Big Ten. Golladay was once tied for the 19th-ranked player in the Huskies' 103rd-ranked class, tabbed by 247Sports as the 384th-ranked receiver in his class.

Murphy-Bunting had no scholarship offers on his high school signing day, and had to wait for even one chance.

Even by MAC standards, the four players were low-ranked high-school recruits — yet became standout players and eventual NFL draft picks, points of pride against the star-system through which recruiting is measured.

"When you actually get to college, you're tying your shoes the same way as the guy at the locker next to you," Miller said. "And when you get out on the field, it doesn't matter how many stars you had at all."

The outliers

At the top of college football, recruiting rankings are often predictive. It is no coincidence that the programs consistently near the top of recruiting rankings — Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, LSU, Georgia, Oklahoma — are regular College Football Playoff contenders loaded with NFL talent.

In the lower levels like the MAC, however, identifying the stars of tomorrow while in high school has proven to be difficult and, sometimes, borderline impossible.

Of the 33 MAC players selected by NFL teams during the past five drafts, 25 of them did not receive an offer from a Power Five school. None were four-star prospects, according to 247Sports' composite rankings, 11 were three-star prospects, 15 were two-stars, and seven weren't ranked all.

Six of them changed positions while in college, and one — CMU's Tyler Conklin, now a Minnesota Vikings tight end — started as a Division II basketball player.

Out of 24 players on last season's all-MAC first-team offense and defense, 19 players did not receive a Power Five offer. Nine received only one offer, four changed positions, and five were transfers.

MAC players in particular have brought avalanches of grief to those on the other side of recruiting rankings. Allen Trieu, who covers Midwestern recruiting for 247, said they're still hearing about players like Khalil Mack, J.J. Watt, and Kareem Hunt, whose recruiting profiles didn't exactly scream superstar.

Over the years, Trieu said it has become a sticking point to better identify the star players who aren't going to schools like Ohio State, Michigan, or Notre Dame.

"The guys who are the Chase Youngs of the world, we expect to get those," Trieu said. "I think what will kind of separate us and relieve some of the skepticism about recruiting rankings is to hit on some of those Group of Five, mid-major guys."

Ohio's Frank Solich has signed only one recruiting class that finished in the top three of the MAC recruiting rankings during his 15-year tenure in Athens but, last year, Solich set the conference record for wins by a coach.

From 2005-12, the top overall recruiting class in the MAC won the league only once, when CMU's 2009 recruiting class won as true freshmen, and mostly because the Chippewas already had Antonio Brown catching passes from Dan LeFevour.

The next five top classes, however, played some role on a MAC title team within five seasons.

In many ways, recruiting is a completely different game in the MAC, where very few recruits are ready-made products in their freshman year.

The art is in multi-year projections — the players Power Five schools missed and the projects on which they passed.

"If you're getting him in the MAC, they're lacking something that the Power Five rejected him for," said Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson, who previously spent five years at Bowling Green.

"I'd rather take a kid that's an inch shorter rather than lacking intangibles or arm strength or athletic ability. If there is a kid who is [6-foot-3] or [6-foot-4] and he looks like Dan Marino, but he's still out there, there's probably a reason those people aren't recruiting him."

An inexact science

For anyone involved in football recruiting, there is no such thing as batting 1.000. There will be mistakes, and current Bowling Green coach Scot Loeffler is the first to admit he's made a few big ones.

Loeffler once traveled to William Penn Charter in Philadelphia to watch a quarterback. His final analysis: Eh.

"I went in, I didn't think he was big enough, I didn't think he was this, I didn't think he was that," Loeffler said.

Within a few years, that assessment looked pretty rough.

It looked even worse 15 years later, when the scrawny quarterback — Matt Ryan — eventually became the NFL's Most Valuable Player.

As a MAC coach, Loeffler's task is to project the players who might not be stud high school recruits, but will develop during four or five seasons in college. Ideally, this process will unearth potential professional players when the projection is right, and hopefully a decent college player even when it is wrong.

"Everyone has made mistakes in this business, and if they say they haven't, they're lying to you," Loeffler said. "The goal is to not make too many mistakes and, if you do make mistakes, it's the type of mistake where the player still has the ability to contribute in some fashion."

Matt Johnson has seen both sides of the coin.

The Kent State assistant coach was the only starting quarterback of the 2010s to win multiple MAC championships, which he did in 2013 and 2015 at Bowling Green.

But then as now, he's a quarter-inch short of 6-foot tall, so Johnson was limited to two offers: BG and Temple.

Johnson said some recruiters openly told him they had players ranked above him simply because they were 6-foot-2 or 6-foot-3 and he was not.

"Now that I'm a college coach, I can appreciate the honesty," Johnson said. "But when I was 17, I didn't want to hear that."

His career became something of a lesson in measurables. Not every player checks every box recruiters want but, Johnson said, "If a kid can play, he can play."

"If we're looking for [6-foot-2] and a kid is only 6-foot but meets every other criteria, we're not going to knock him just because of that," Johnson said. "If he can do it, he can do it."

Changing landscape

In the early days of recruiting rankings, Trieu recalled coaches having to physically mail highlight tapes. Further, Trieu said there was a chance they would never see players who did not attend recruiting camps, went to rural high schools, or played on teams with small amounts of Division I talent.

Advances in technology now mean that nearly every high school player has access to quality video and multiple vehicles to distribute it. For those who create rankings, it's now a matter of sorting huge amounts of information.

"Now we feel like there's no excuse," Trieu said. "Every kid has a Hudl. Most kids have a Twitter where they're posting some kind of video. You can even get track footage or basketball footage and all this other stuff we never had before."

As a result, Trieu said he believes the rankings have become better at finding the players who will be successful despite not having Power Five offers.

One was James Morgan, a quarterback from Wisconsin that Trieu and the 247 team rated highly despite Morgan's offer profile. Trieu said they couldn't understand why Power Five teams didn't jump in with Morgan, whom they rated as a four-star player, a distinction they kept even with no major interest.

After a rocky start at Bowling Green and a transfer to Florida International, Morgan proved them right — and was a fourth-round selection of the New York Jets last month.

There always are outliers, and Trieu said those making the rankings do their best to find them early.

"There's always a kid or two every year who breaks the mold as far as what the analytics would say size-wise or speed-wise or whatever," Trieu said. "I think what we've tried to do is identify those outliers without going too crazy about it. Every 5-9 or 5-10 quarterback now thinks they're Kyler Murray, and it's our job to pinpoint which guys could be that without going overboard."

Some years after Ryan, Loeffler was on the right side of a different Atlanta Falcons draft pick from Boston College. Former Eagles coach Steve Addazio told Loeffler about Chris Lindstrom, an undersized lineman with no other FBS offers who Addazio believed was a future pro.

As offensive coordinator, Loeffler helped Lindstrom bloom into one of the nation’s best linemen — he started 49 games in college — and the 14th pick in the 2019 NFL draft.

The trick of the trade, he said, is to keep finding the players who will prove nearly everyone wrong four or five years later.

"The first thing is you have to do a great job evaluating," Loeffler said. "Then, when you do that, you have enough guts to take guys like that."

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