Wednesday’s college football National Signing Day was a big one for college football hopefuls and athletic departments across the country.
Ohio’s class is ranked the sixth-best in the Mid-American Conference as of press time by Rivals.com and Scout.com — two websites considered to be the authority on college recruiting rankings. ESPN, another top recruiting authority, hides its rankings behind a paywall.
Rivals and Scout rank Ohio’s class No.101 and No 81 overall in the nation, respectively, as of press time. The top-rated prospect brought in by the Bobcats is safety Deontai Williams, a 3-or-4-star safety as rated by various outlets from Jacksonville, Florida. Williams had offers from numerous major programs, including another Athens-based college, the University of Georgia.
Having the sixth-ranked class in the MAC isn’t anything to complain about, considering there is a minimal difference between each class.
However, the difference between the money Ohio spends and the rest of the conference spends on recruiting isn’t quite as small.
According to data published this week by USA Today, in the 2012-13 academic year, the Bobcats spent roughly $264,000 on recruiting, which is about $73,000 more than the next-highest-spending MAC team, the University of Massachusetts. Ohio was also the only school in the MAC to spend more than $200,000 on its recruiting budget during that academic year. The school spent almost $127,000 more than Northern Illinois — which has appeared in each of the past five MAC Championship games, winning three of them.
It’s worth noting that we don’t know how much Ohio spent on recruiting this year and that Rivals ranked Ohio’s 2013 recruiting class — the year these figures are from — as the fifth-best in the MAC. (Scout rated that class the ninth-best in the conference.)
No one will doubt that top athletic officials and football recruiters did the best they could with that money, but it’s hard to convince the average fan that the difference in spending between the Bobcats and the next-best MAC team was well spent when colleges spending much less than that were able to rank comparably to the Bobcats in initial rankings.
One would think the school could bring in a similar recruiting class while spending tens-of-thousands of dollars less than they presently do.
The Post will be digging into the USA Today database in the coming days to help better understand what exactly that additional money is used for.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post's executive editors: editor-in-chief Jim Ryan, managing editor Sara Jerde, opinion editor Xander Zellner and projects editor Allan Smith. Post editorials are independent of the publication's news coverage.
