Are you going off that 247 talent composite cluster****? I don't think their talent composite looks at starters, two deep, age, etc. It appears to look at total roster including red shirts. It says we had the worst talent in the Big Ten in 2015, 3rd worst in 2016 and 2017. Basically it's a totally worthless measure -one can read about their astonishing methodology below. What really matters? Wins and losses, and performance in real games.
2017 Big-Ten College Football Team Talent Composite
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The Formula
Team Ranking Explanation
where c is a specific team's total number of commits and Rn is the 247Sports Composite Rating of the nth-best commit times 100.
Explanation
In order to create the most comprehensive Team Recruiting Ranking without any notion of bias, 247Sports Team Recruiting Ranking is solely based on the 247Sports Composite Rating.
Each recruit is weighted in the rankings according to a GAUSSIAN DISTRIBUTION FORMULA (a bell curve), where a team's best recruit is worth the most points. You can think of a team's point score as being the sum of ratings of all the team's commits where the best recruit is worth 100% of his rating value, the second best recruit is worth nearly 100% of his rating value, down to the last recruit who is worth a small fraction of his rating value. This formula ensures that all commits contribute at least some value to the team's score without heavily rewarding teams that have several more commitments than others.
Readers familiar with the Gaussian distribution formula will note that we use a varying value for σ based on the standard deviation for the total number of commits between schools for the given sport. This STANDARD DEVIATION creates a bell curve with an inflection point near the average number of players recruited per team.
Below is a graphical representation of how our formula works. You can see that the area under the curve gets smaller both as the rating for a commit decreases and as the number of total commits for a school increases. The y-axis in this graph represents the percentage weight of the score that gets applied to an overall team ranking.
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