Bud Elliott’s annual accounting of who’s got talent is back.
Put simply, to win the national championship, college football teams need to sign more four- and five-star recruits (AKA “Blue Chips”) than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes.
This has been true basically as far back as modern internet recruiting rankings have existed.
… This is a necessary but not sufficient condition. It does not guarantee a national championship, but a team not meeting it is almost certainly guaranteed not to win it all.
There’s even some subtext for Dan Mullen. Or at least for the people who made him sound like a better coach than he was.
That is not to say that development does not matter. It certainly does. But nobody wins a national title by player development in lieu of elite recruiting. Plenty of coaches who are regarded as elite have never sniffed winning it all because they cannot accumulate enough talent. On the other hand, there are examples of coaches who are not regarded as premier head men who have won it all thanks to elite recruits. Not to lump them into the same category, but nobody ever accused Gene Chizik, Les Miles, Mack Brown, or Ed Orgeron of being tactical masterminds.
Coaching matters. But recruiting is by far the most important piece when it comes to separating the good from the great.
Anyway, here’s what the ’22 edition looks like:

What’s striking there is that there are now five teams at 70% or better — and three at 75+%.
In 2014, no team was above 75 percent. In 2015, only Alabama was. In 2016 and 2017, it was still just Alabama. The 2018 BCR saw Ohio State get into that super elite class.
This year, there are still three teams over that number. But note that Oklahoma and Texas A&M are also over the 70 percent mark. The BCR has never featured five teams above seventy percent.
Oh, and Alabama, which set the all-time record for the highest BCR in 2021, smashed its own record in 2022, at an incredible 89.4 percent!
Yeah, any day now, Nick Saban’s coming back to earth.
The other side of concentration at the top is that there’s that much less talent for everyone else to share. Gapping, bitchez!