Key for reaching title game: recruiting dominance
■ The Alabama Crimson Tide and Ohio State Buckeyes have been two of the top-three recruiting teams in recent years. It’s no surprise they’ll meet in the CFP title game.
The Alabama Crimson Tide’s entire starting secondary is made up of South Floridians — one former five-star recruit, another former top-50 prospect and two more former top-150 players — and three starters on offense are from Florida.
Both of the Ohio State Buckeyes’ starting cornerbacks are from Florida, too — one former five-star and another former four-star — and one starter on the offensive line is a former top-10 recruit from the state.
The two teams, which will meet in the 2021 College Football Playoff National Championship at Hard Rock Stadium on Monday night, have the two top-ranked Classes of 2021, according to the 247Sports.com composite rankings, and possess rosters with far more blue-chip talent than almost anyone else. Ultimately, both teams rode their massive talent advantages to easy wins in the CFP semifinals to set up their meeting Monday in Miami Gardens.
“We recruit good players coming out of high school, but then there’s a developmental piece that’s needed to develop that player throughout his time and throughout his career in college,” Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian said Wednesday. “Clearly, both programs do that extremely well.”
For the No. 1 Crimson Tide, it has made for one of the most dominant seasons in college football history, with every regular season game decided by at least 17 points.
For No. 3 Ohio State, it meant making the CFP National Championship after one of the strangest seasons in history — the Buckeyes (7-0, 5-0 Big Ten) played only six regular-season games, then breezed past the No. 2 Clemson Tigers, 49-28, in the 2021 Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1.
Since at least 2012, every team to win the national championship has
had at least 50 percent of the roster made up of former blue-chip recruits, according to 247Sports. Alabama’s “blue-chip ratio” sits at 83 percent. Ohio State’s is 80. The No. 11 Georgia Bulldogs were the only other team this season with a ratio better than 65 percent and Clemson — the Crimson Tide’s closest peer last decade — have a ratio of only 63 percent.
The Miami Hurricanes and Florida State Seminoles entered the 2020 season with a blue-chip ratio worse than 50 percent. Florida had a 63 percent ratio — the eighth best in the country, behind the Tigers by percentage points.
In the first six years of the playoff, only one finalist had a ratio of 80 percent. In Year 7, both finalists crossed the threshold. The gap between the top teams and the rest of the country is growing, as evidenced by two lopsided semifinals.
“We just spent most of our time trying to figure out how to best utilize the players we had,” Buckeyes coach Ryan Day said Thursday, recalling the earliest days after he succeeded former coach Urban Meyer, “and continue to recruit at a high level.”
HOW OHIO STATE
WAS BUILT
Day has even managed to build on what Meyer started. When it won the 2014 CFP National Championship, Ohio State had a blue-chip ratio of 68 percent. The Buckeyes’ win against Alabama in the 2014 semifinals was a clear upset. Now the two are true peers.
Kerry Coombs directly traced the program’s growth the postseason run at the end of the 2013 season, when Ohio State rode a backup quarterback to their its national title in more than a decade.
“You really felt Buckeye nation at that point in time,” the Buckeyes defensive coordinator said Wednesday. “Urban, who’s obviously one of the great recruiters of all time and had been establishing Ohio State as a national recruiting program, and bringing in some really, really good talent — I think that that really helped solidify that and helped us take off to be able to recruit with the best in the country.
“It was that three-week stretch, at least for me, that was a true game changer for our future here.”
HOW ALABAMA
WAS BUILT
The equation is less complicated for the Crimson Tide. Alabama (12-0, 10-0) has had a ratio better than 75 percent since 2015 and was better than 70 percent for each of its four titles last decade.
The Crimson Tide set a template for Ohio State and other wannabe superpowers to follow. Start local, and go national or even global.
Three of Alabama’s starters are from in-state, then the Crimson Tide supplements them with five from Louisiana and seven from Florida, but star running back Najee Harris is from California and starting wide receiver John Metchie is from Canada.
The Buckeyes’ model is similar. They start five players from Ohio — the most of any state — and they have others neighboring states like Indiana and Pennsylvania, but 12 different states are represented in their typical starting lineup.
“Every school probably takes a little bit of a different approach based on in the surrounding areas, the talent pool that is near you,” Sarkisian said. “Everybody is different, but at the end of the day, when you can recruit good football players, you can recruit good people and then you have the staff that can develop them, you give yourselves a chance to be in the position that we’re in.”
THE FLORIDA FACTOR
No state will have more starters in the national championship than Florida.
For Alabama: All-American quarterback Mac Jones, offensive linemen Alex Leatherwood and Evan Neal, and defensive backs cornerbacks Patrick Surtain II, Josh Jobe, Daniel Wright and Jordan Battle. For Ohio State: tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere, and cornerbacks Shaun Wade and Sevyn Banks. All but Jones were blue-chip recruits and five of the 10 were five-star players.
In recent years, Miami and the Gators have landed the most blue-chip prospects from Florida, but the majority of still leave the state.
Alabama’s seven starters from Florida are the most of any state. The Buckeyes’ three trail only Ohio.
The clearest path for the Hurricanes and Gators — and even Florida State — to reenter national contention is to truly own Florida and the 2021 recruiting cycle represented some progress. Miami has signed 11 blue-chip players from the state — the most of any team — and the Gators and Crimson Tide are tied for second at five. Clemson has three, Georgia has just one and Ohio State doesn’t have a single Floridian in its class.
For now, almost everyone else still faces a long climb to match these two finalists’ recruiting success.