All the Auburn recruiting Web sites reported yesterday on Auburn picking up its 20th commitment for its 2009 recruiting class in Mississippi athlete Jamie Collins. If you're keeping count, that's 10 commitments since the start of June. At this rate, they might catch Ohio State (they've got 24) soon for the most in the nation.

I have to admit I'm extremely intrigued by the Auburn coaching staff's philosophy with this recruiting class. They're not sitting back and letting some recruiting site's star system dictate (more to the fans than to them, obviously) who they should be recruiting. They're identifying who they want, they're offering them and they're getting commitments from them.

I love taking shots at those recruiting sites as much as anybody, often because the people writing for them tend to be fanboy clowns, but I can't deny that their star system is a very good indicator of what lies ahead for a program. It's certainly not a rule that a highly rated recruiting class yields huge results -- and plenty of people have written about how recruiting rankings mean nothing -- but it's at the very least a trend.

On one hand, you have this note, which I wrote about on my old Georgia blog:
Twenty of the 31 first-round picks in the NFL draft received a three-star grade or below, while only 11 were rated either four or five stars coming out of high school. In total, there were three non-rated players picked in the first round, nine two-star players, eight three-star players, seven four-star players and four five-star players.

But it turns out that's kind of a deceptive statistic -- statistics can often be that way -- simply when you consider there are so few recruits who are given five-star grades. A five-star player has like a 1-in-9 or 1-in-10 shot of eventually being named an all-American. Those are pretty decent odds.

And check this out. Thanks to the exhaustive analysis of the subject on Sunday Morning Quarterback, an excellent blog, we see that there's a pretty strong correlation between recruiting ranking and success on the field. Here are the top 20 BCS teams between 2002 and 2007 based on winning percentage against BCS opposition. The "Rank" column is their cumulative recruiting ranking from Rivals.com. for the time period.
(click on the link above if you want to see an easier-to-read version of this chart. I'm too dumb to figure out how to put tabs in this thing).

RankTeam Record Win % Rank Difference
1. Southern Cal 63-8 .887 1 -
2 Ohio State 54-11 .831 12 + 10
3 Oklahoma 54-13 .806 3 -
4 Texas 48-12 .800 7 + 3
5 Georgia 52-15 .776 2 -3
6 LSU 48-15 .762 5 -1
7 Auburn 46-17 .730 10 + 3
8 Louisville 31-13 .705 48 + 40
9 Michigan 45-19 .703 11 + 2
10 W. Virginia 40-18 .690 44 + 34
11 Virginia Tech 41-20 .672 30 + 19
12 Miami 40-22 .645 8 -4
13 Florida 40-23 .635 4 -9
14 Wisconsin 38-22 .633 45 + 31
15 Boston Coll. 35-21 .625 41 + 26
16 California 38-23 .623 18 + 2
17 Iowa 39-24 .619 39 + 21
18 Florida State 44-28 .611 6 -12
19 Tennessee 38-25 .603 9 -10
20 Virginia 37-25 .597 19 -1

Basically, Auburn has the seventh-best record against BCS schools between 2002-07 at 46-17. Their average recruiting rank in that time was 10, meaning they've performed three spots better than their recruiting rank. Right behind Auburn in eighth is Louisville, which had an average recruiting ranking of 48 -- so the Cardinals outperformed their recruiting ranking moreso than any other BCS program in the nation.

Just for fun, the greatest underperformers among BCS schools based on recruiting rankings? Interestingly, SEC schools South Carolina, Ole Miss and Mississippi State have totals that are among the four worst. And four SEC schools, when you include Alabama, rank among the nine most underperforming BCS teams based on their recruiting rankings.
36. Alabama (-20)
45. South Carolina (-32)
47. Texas A&M (-33)
54. Ole Miss (-30)
56. North Carolina (-29)
57. Washington (-24)
58. Arizona (-29)
60. Illinois (-20)
64. Mississippi State (-29)

And the greatest overperformers?
8. Louisville (+40)
10. West Virginia (+34)
14. Wisconsin (+31)
23. Georgia Tech (+31)
34. Wake Forest (+30)