Kentucky Football: Pace Of 2015 Recruiting As Of Today

In July I put together some graphs illustrating UK’s pace of recruiting along with some other notable teams on our schedule plus, for the hell of it, Alabama. With a couple of Yahtzees and a Nahtzee (nod to Mister Williams) along with some changes on other teams, I have updated the graphs as show below. As previously, the timeline is relative to National Signing Day (NSD) which will fall on February 4th. The vertical dotted lines on the graphs are "today".

The first chart shows UK’s pace covering the ‘14 and ‘15 recruiting classes and you can see the ‘15 class still lags behind the pace of the previous class. The graph is simply the cumulative number of recruits as we approach signing day (X-axis is Days until NSD, Y-Axis is Number of Recruits) I tend to think the shortfall is due to Stoops pursuing higher caliber targets that are waiting until later in the process to make a decision. Also, UK has a slew of offers out there and we don’t know how many of these may have been pulled or put off due to pursuit of a better player. It is what it is.

Figure 1:  Pace for 2014 and 2015

Next is how UK stacks up against several other teams in filling up their class. Alabama (21) and Tennessee (24) appear to be about complete but Kentucky still has at least 11 slots open in this class. It just give me the feeling the staff has a lot of recruits waiting to see how we fare through the rest of the season before pulling the trigger.

Figure 2:  UK recruiting vs. selected others

And how do these recruits rate? Next is the running average of the star rating of the players for each team. Both the ‘14 and ‘15 classes are included for Kentucky and ‘15 only for the other teams. The data line rises and falls as recruits sign. Unlike the other schools, Kentucky’s highest average didn’t occur until our eighth commit (Conrad); other schools peaked earlier in the process. With last week’s signing of a couple of 4 stars by Tennessee their average is rising. I was surprised by Arkansas’ small but higher rated class at this point but a strong finish by UK could bump us over the Razorbacks and the Volunteers. (Hello Damion!)

Figure 3:  Cumulative average stars vs. selected schools

In the original post there was a request to see when the higher graded players commit. Do they sign early and get it over with or do they milk the process and wait to the end? To make it easy on myself I just used the players from all the schools used above. The chart shows what rated stars signed relative to NSD. Correlations? I’m all ears.

Figure 4:  Signings relative to NSD by star rating