https://247sports.com/Season/2020-Football/CompositeTeamR...

1) Toledo
2) Bowling Green
3) WMU
4) Miami
5) NIU
6) Kent State
7) EMU
8) Ball State
9) CMU
10) Akron
11) OHIO
12) Buffalo

I know rankings aren't everything, especially when you get down to the MAC level, but this is pretty bleak. Any silver linings?

I'm not really seeing a big difference between the MAC teams. Only the total amount of recruits. Our walkon program will always lower that total number. We had 12/15 as 3 stars.

This is a good point. The supposed #2 rated class in the MAC is BG, and they had 31 total commits. (Would love to see what they're doing with gray shirts and blue shirts to get six extra around the 25-man rule, by the way.) About ten of their recruits are rated lower than any OU recruit (except for Cleotis Anglin, who they have misclassified as a skinny TE, and the punter, who is always rated low).

The better metric is average ranking. Only Toledo and Western stand out there. I know Toledo is strong in recruiting but they have also taken some chances on some academic question marks, like RB Lamy Constant (originally a WVU commit) who is highly rated. Every other team is within a fraction of a point of OU.

Bottom line is that while on the whole, higher rankings equal better players, it is difficult to use the rankings to project team and individual performance. Scouting, development, and player effort and other intangibles play a far more important role. Seems like OU has done a pretty good job at all those things historically, so given all the previous information, I see no reason for fans to worry about this year's class rankings.

As I have pointed out in the past many times, the recruiting rankings are are for amusement only, once you get below the very top teams. First, they don't put nearly as much time evaluating the 2-3 star recruits as they do into the 4-5 star recruits. Second, there are a lot more 2-3 star recruits than 4-5 star recruits.

The result is very little ability to discriminate between one MAC class and the next. On 247Sports, the average grades of MAC classes, per athlete:
Toledo 83.16
WMU 82.39
Miami 81.39
NIU 81.21
Kent St 80.95
BG 80.85
EMU 80.40
CMU 80.35
Ohio 80.32
Akron 80.20
Buffalo 80.14
Ball St 80.11

That is a 3.8% difference between the best and worst. When you get to the P5 conferences, the differences are a lot greater:
ACC 11.8%
SEC 10.5%
Big 12 9.5%
B1G 9.1%
PAC 12 6.9%

And it's not just the MAC. The AAC does have some separation, but the rest of the G5, there just isn't a lot of difference from one team to the next.
AAC 7.9%
CUSA 5.5%
MWC 4.3%
MAC 3.8%
SBC 2.9%

Thus, my takeaway from the recruiting services is that they don't see a lot of difference between the athletes each team recruits. Thus, winning and losing will, in the end, be determined by which coach is the best at evaluating minor differences, and which coaches do the best job of getting the most out of the athletes they recruit.

Constant had offers from Duke and Boston College, so I doubt academics were a problem.