Best Classes

Determining which recruiting class is the "best" is obviously a subjective task. How do you define best? I've chosen three metrics. The first is Overall Winning Percentage. How many games have all the players for a particular class won versus the number they've played. Since the total number of games each class plays in varies from year to year, we can't base it solely on total number of wins.If the goal of every college player is to win the NCAA Tournament, another good metric is the NCAA Tournament winning percentage of all the players in a class. Again, some classes may have played in more NCAA Tourney games, but using winning percentage we can compare apples to apples.

Lastly, while the goal of many high school recruits is to win a NCAA national championship, most really want to be drafted by the NBA. So I show that as well. Next to the number of picks from each class, I show the average number of years played per player (for all players, not just those drafted).

I've also got a page on the Most Disappointing Classes.

It is interesting to see that since 1998, the class with the highest overall winning percentage (2006) is the first one after the NBA inacted a new rule not allowing players to be drafted right after high school. It will be interesting to see if the 2007 and 2008 classes continue this trend. Those classes are lower now because currently they are freshmen and sophomores at the college level. In the next couple of years they'll be junior and seniors with more experience and likely more wins.

With the exception of 1999 and 2008, the NCAA Tourney Winning Percentage rank of a class is within 2 spots of their Overall Winning Percentage. In fact, 1999 is the only class that has a significantly higher NCAA Tourney Winning Percentage than their Overall Winning Percentage.

Lastly, the NBA Draft Pick numbers are interesting. There doesn't appear to be a strong correlation between a high number of draft picks in a class and that class performing better than average in college. The top 4 in draft pick classes are all in the bottom half on the list of Winning Percentage. This is likely due to many of the best players leaving earlier than their peers. However, the Years Per Player number is not much different from other classes so that may not be the case.

Next up are the same metrics but just for the Top 10 recruits from each class. These players get the most exposure and are considered the best coming out of high school. Comparing these numbers with the numbers of the Top 100 shown above can highlight particular classes that had a very strong Top 10.

It is pretty easy to spot the big difference in Winning Percentage for the 2002 and 2000 classes when you compare with the Top 100 Winning Percentage. The Top 10 Winning Percentage for the 2000 class is .740 while the Top 100 Winning Percentage for the 2000 class is .603, making it the largest difference among all classes. Not only that, the Top 10 of the 2000 class have a higher NCAA Tourney Winning Percentage than their Overall Winning Percentage.

It is interesting that 4 classes have a higher NCAA Tourney Winning Percentage than Overall Winning Percentage. The Top 10 can be counted on to win more than the rest of the Top 100 and can generally be expected to do better in the NCAA Tourney.

Now let's look at the Top 51-100 players. These players aren't as highly touted but are still some of the best coming out of high school. At most 20% of this group get drafted and at worst only 6% of them will. Their winning percentages are significantly lower than that of the Top 10 by 10-15 points. Only 1999 had a higher NCAA Tourney Winning Percentage than Overall Winning Percentage, so these players don't tend to rise to the occasion quite like the Top 10 do.

From this analysis we can make an argument that the 2005 and 2006 Top 100 classes have performed the best since 1998. They were #1 and #2 for Overall Winning Percentage and #2 and #3 in NCAA Tourney Winning Percentage. However, they did not rank high in terms of NBA Draft Picks, which indicates another study is needed to analyze NBA success among the Top 100. 1999 stands out as an oddity where it either underachieved during the regular season or overachieved during the postseason.

As far as the Top 10 recruits, 2000 stands out as performing significantly better than the Top 100 that year. Again 2005 and 2006 lead the list, but 2002 did the best during the NCAA Tournament. It is not surprising that the majority of the Top 10 recruits ultimately get drafted by the NBA.

The Top 51-100 recruits follow similar trends to the Top 100. These players tend to stay around longer (as shown by the Years Per Player) which means they are going to influence the class stats much more than the Top 10 (even outside of there being 40 more of them). You can only expect from 6-20% of the 51-100 players to be drafted.