Press conference and Signing Day reception video:

It is so painful to watch these videos when you can't hear the questions. Perhaps, it's time to start a BA fundraising campaign to buy a directional second mic. As is, this is pretty bush league.

As I posted on another thread, that number goes up and down over time:
Looking at just Freshmen, here's how the percentage from Ohio has varied:
2006 - 9 of 15 from Ohio
2007 - 9 of 20 from Ohio
2008 - 5 of 15 from Ohio
2009 - 3 of 17 from Ohio
2010 - 7 of 13 from Ohio
2011 - 11 of 21 from Ohio
2012 - 4 of 14 from Ohio
2013 - 8 of 18 from Ohio
2014 - 13 of 18 from Ohio
2015 - 7 of 16 from Ohio
2016 - 11 of 18 from Ohio
2017 - 2 of 19 from Ohio

I blame the drop on the fact that Ohio gets most of it's in-state players early, and recruiting lost some momentum when Coach George left in May, which is about when in-state recruits start committing. They recovered and had a very nice class, but it has less in-state content than usual.

There was a comment about Ohio State's lack of Ohio players on an article about them. It said it was a very poor year for recruits from Ohio and next year would be much better. Someone was complaining about the same things for Ohio State.

Yes, this was the year of the short term ban. If Ohio actually canceled their camps around the state that would explain the difference for sure.

Yesterday, around 6pm, was collectively the most optimistic moment of the year for college football fans. Most every fanbase is SURE that THIS is the recruiting class that gets it done for them.

I've stopped worrying about it. I'm just gonna enjoy the ride. Football is an excuse to sit outside and drink beer with friends and reminisce. And that's good enough for me. Hopefully this really IS the class that gets it done for Frank. But if it's not, we'll be right back here next year thinking the same thing. And we'll be right back outside Peden the next fall, red Solo cups in hand, burgers and dogs on the grill, telling the same stories about how dumb we used to be.

Go Bobcats.

Casper, as I said all season, (and for longer than that) I am not a fan of the 247Composite rating because it takes the 247 rating, which I think has value, and adds in ratings from other services, which I think have little value. It's like you have a cheap wine, OK, but not great, so you try to improve it by mixing in some other stuff. When you add a little vinegar, a little mud, and some bath water, for some reason it ends up worse than it started.

As I have said for a long time, I have two measures that I consider to be of value. The first is the 247Sports rating itself. The second is the competitive offers. I went through quickly last night and looked at the 247Sports numbers, their actual ratings, not the composite ratings, and here is what I found. If you include all players signed or enrolled who are rated (note:Rourke is the only player in the MAC with no rating assigned), then rank teams in terms of the average rating (ignoring quantity):
1. Toledo 23 recruits, avg 80.8, 13 3-star
2. Miami 20 recruits, average 79.7, 12 3-star
3. WMU 21 recruits, average 78.8, 10 3-star
4.(tie) Ohio 20 recruits, average 78.3, 10 3-star
Ball St 27 recruits, average 78.3 11 3-star
6. CMU 26 recruits, average 77.9, 11 3-star
7. Buffalo 21 recruits, average 77.8, 7 3-star
8. BG 24 recruits, average 77.7, 9 3-star
9. NIU 20 recruits, average 75.7, 6 3-star
10. Akron 13 recruits, average 74.9, 2 3-star
11. Kent 21 recruits, average 74.7, 3 3-star
12. emu 27 recruits, average 74.0, 2 3-star

Now, as it happens, 247Sports assigns a 70 as a rating for players they haven't looked at. Those players might be really good, or really bad. For Ohio the players they have not rated include Rourke, Floyd, Ross, and Ogun-Semore. The way they do their team rankings, those players are excluded, and considered to have no value in the recruiting class.

Some teams, like NIU and EMU, have a lot of unranked players, which really hurts their team ranking. Others like Miami and Toledo have no unranked players, which helps theirs. Ohio is in the middle, more or less. In any case, what happens if you drop out all the unrated players for all teams? Then the average rankings look like this:

1. Toledo 23 ranked recruits, 80.8 average (12/23=57% rated 3 stars)
2. Ohio 17 ranked recruits, 79.8 average (10/17=59% rated 3 stars)
3. Miami 20 ranked recruits, 79.7 average (12/20=60% rated 3 stars)
4. tie Ball State 24 ranked recruits 79.3 average (11/24=46% rated 3 stars)
CMU 22 ranked recruits 79.3 average (11/22=50% rated 3 stars)
6. tie BG 20 ranked recruits 79.2 average (9/20=45% rated 3 stars)
WMU 20 ranked recruits, 79.2 average (10/20=50% rated 3 stars)
8. NIU 15 ranked recruits, 78.7 average (6/15=40% rated 3 stars)
9. Buffalo 20 ranked recruits, 78.2 average (7/20=35% rated 3 stars)
10. Kent 13 ranked recruits, 77.5 average (3/13=23% rated 3 stars)
11. Akron 9 ranked recruits, 77.1 average (2/9=22% rated 3 stars)
12. EMU 17 ranked recruits 76.4 average (2/17=12% rated 3 stars)

Conclusion: I think a rating based on competitive offers is the best way to go, but I don't have time to do that are the moment. This in the next best. I think it shows what we all feel intuitively, that the average rating of the Ohio players was pretty high. I'm not convinced that had Rourke, Ogun-Semore, Floyd, and Ross been rated, they would have lowered the average, and in fact, I think they are all four going to be very good players.

My second conclusion is that the MAC overall did have a good recruiting class. Toledo was clearly at the top, but from there down there isn't much difference between Ohio, Miami, Ball State, CMU, BG, and WMU.

My third conclusion is that the quality of NIU, Kent, and EMU are all kind of a mystery. They each include 8-10 players who haven't been rated. I have no idea how good those classes will turn out to be. Based on the relatively lower quality of the players that were ranked for those schools, I tend to think that their classes will turn out to be not that great.

I'll give him credit - he waited until after signing day. My condolences to him, though. I never cared for Ames at all.

Their methodology isn't biased, but neither is what I did. There are two differences:
1. Should you take players that haven't been rated, and treat them as if they are bad, or should you just not average them in until they are rated? The 247Composite rating takes players that aren't rated, and includes them as "70", then the points they contribute to the team ranking is based on "ranking-70", so they are treated as of no value. I happen to think that the unranked players for Ohio are very good players, and for all I know the unranked players for the other teams are as well. Therefore I think including them as being of no value will lead to erroneous conclusions.
2. Does averaging in ESPN, Scout.com, and Rivals ratings make the rating of more value, or less? I have found no correlation between those ratings and how the players perform, so I don't believe that averaging them in can possibly improve the accuracy.

In the end I think that rating the players based on how many offers they got will be more accurate than either of the above. I will eventually get that done, but doing that takes a lot of time, which I don't have at the moment. That's also an unbiased rating method, by the way.

One final point is this: I didn't choose these two rating methods because they make Ohio look better. I chose them long ago. Go back to page 3, for example, of this thread, where I used these exact methods. In the end the only rating that will matter is how they perform on the field during their career. I feel very confident that this will be a very good group.

Put another way, when we look at this class, we intuitively feel that it is a good class. If you do a two stage analysis, you get the same result. First you look at the 247 Team rankings, and you realize that the only thing holding Ohio down in the bottom half is that they have 4 unranked players, Rourke, Floyd, Ross, and Ogun-Semore. Then you look at those four, and ask, are they actually bad players, and you realize that no, they are probably as good or better than the rest of the class. Then you stop worrying...

You can make the generalization that Alabama had a better recruiting class with some of those 5 stars off the charts. Solich was saying that a lot of "3 star" guys could be depending on the evaluation a 4 star and the same goes for 2 star guys might be 3 stars. For the most part the days when the physical talent difference was so much higher to the point where you couldn't dream of competing on the field is over. Everyone has 300 pound OLs and RB's that can run 4.5's.

Wow. You can do and write really long, somewhat convoluted analysis.

Or you can judge it by the remarkably mediocre results achieved on the field over 12 years at OHIO.

I cannot argue with that as it carries hope AND willingness to wait and see.

So much of the other comments during the week made it seem as if everyone of our recruits is terrific, as if they're all Alabama-good.

That and significant inability to admit the achieved mediocrity are much more annoying than most think that I am.

One reason that your stuff irritates people, I think, is that you have no consistent theme. You seem to just throw stuff at the wall, and hope that something sticks. These "mediocre" results (4 MAC East Championships in 12 years, 2d or 3rd highest winning percentage in the MAC over the long term, etc, etc.), how have they been achieved? Why aren't they better? Is it poor recruiting - Ohio just can't get talent? Is it poor coaching, so that players don't get better? Is it poor strategy, so that games are lost in game management? It can't be all of them, or Ohio would be 0-12, so which is it?

By contrast, my perspective is very different than yours. In my perspective, Ohio has very good coaching, especially at certain positions (LB, DL, WR), and players recruited by Ohio improve dramatically in their time at Ohio. Game management and strategy is good, too, and they use what they have to work with well. Year in and year out, Ohio end up ranked 15-20 places higher than you would predict from recruiting alone.

The biggest problem is that it seems to be difficult to recruit enough good players to Athens, for whatever reason. Part of it is obviously the lack of a local area that produces tons of high quality talent - of all the parts of Ohio, SE Ohio produces the least FBS level talent. That requires them to recruit SW Ohio, in competition with UC/Miami, NE Ohio in competition with Akron/Kent, and Central Ohio in competition with everyone, or requires them to go out of state for talent. That's a hard thing to accomplish, and I think explains Ohio's difficulties from 1970-1996.

In my opinion, Ohio has gotten a lot out of the players that they have gotten. Their recruiting classes have been ranked in the bottom half of the MAC most years. Using the 247Composite, which isn't my favorite ranking, but which is the handiest ranking, Ohio has been ranked as follows:
2009 10th
2010 12th
2011 10th
2012 6th
2013 11th
2014 6th
2015 5th
2016 7th

Thus, if Ohio had average coaching, Ohio, on average, should finish about 8th every year. If Ohio had the below-average coaching that you allege, they should be lower than eight, and should be in the running for last every year. Somehow, with the 8th best players, Ohio manages to be in the top 2-4 teams virtually every year. How can that be if they have below average coaching?

The reason I follow recruiting is simple. From my worldview, these players, once they arrive, will get very good coaching. They will get better. They will produce better results than you would expect from them, if they were playing elsewhere. Each year I see improvement in the two measures that I think are the most predictive, the raw rating from 247Sports, and the number of competitive offers that the players turned down to accept the opportunity to play at Ohio. In my worldview, if those two measure stagnate or regress, the program will stagnate or regress. If they keep going up, which they have been, then the program will keep going up.

I have posted these numbers before. Here is the table of competitive offers that were turned down each year:
2006 .65
2007 .76
2008 1.40
2009 1.02
2010 .87
2011 2.62
2012 2.64
2013 2.17
2014 2.28
2015 2.31
2016 3.00
2017 4.79
Note that there is about a 4 year lag before a recruiting class reaches it's maximum influence on results. Note also that the 2011-2 classes did not turn out as well as predicted, for whatever reason. Thus, the declining numbers from 2008-10 predicted that the program would "stagnate" after 2012 for 2-3 years, then start improving again. We are now in that period where we should see teams get better and better each year, driven by better and better recruits each year, starting about 2014. Yes, Ohio lost some talented players this year, but they also have a lot of players recruited in 2014-17 who will return.

I think my worldview explains the results I have seen on the field. Do you have a coherent worldview, other than that everything is awful? If you do, please explain it, so that we can consider it. Just throwing stuff at the wall isn't ever going to convince the majority.