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How good is their latest class? Who knows? Check back in three years or so. But in the around-the-clock world of college football recruiting, there are winners and there are losers. And they get declared now. Rivals, Scout, ESPN and 247Sports all take turns ranking players and teams in a lucrative business that makes recruiting a 365-days-a-year obsession for some fans. Recruiting rankings matter. Until they don’t. Five-star players are great. Unless they’re not. Nothing matters more in college football than recruiting. Hire the best coach and it usually doesn’t mean a thing without exceptional players. Yet on the flip side, teams can have exceptional talent and underachieve without proper coaching and discipline. How good are recruiting rankings at predicting future college football success? That’s the difficult question Athlon Sports set out to answer by reevaluating past rankings — all by Rivals, for consistency purposes — and seeing how those results played out on the field. If you talk to coaches, they’re all pleased every single year by their recruiting class. The next coach to stand up on Signing Day and declare, “We did poorly, my bad,” will be the first. Yet privately, coaches know there are winners and losers in recruiting, even if it may take several years for that to become evident. Eight of the past 10 teams with a No. 1 recruiting class by Rivals played for the BCS championship within three years, and seven won the title. The only Rivals No. 1 not to play for a national title within three years was 2006 USC, which would have played for the BCS championship in the 2006 season if the Trojans had not lost on the final weekend. The other No. 1 class not to play for the title within three years is 2010 USC, whose clock is still ticking. Between 2007 and 2011, Alabama produced the best average ranking from Rivals. Nick Saban’s stockpiling of elite talent translated into two national championships in the past three years, plus four straight 10-win seasons. But recruiting rankings aren’t the end-all, be-all, either. If they were, why have Texas, Florida, Florida State, Notre Dame and Georgia all experienced relatively poor seasons recently despite being among the 10 highest-ranked classes over the past five years? Or, the question needs to be asked, were those classes also misevaluated by the analysts from the beginning? Read more: http://www.athlonsports.com/college-football/college-football-recruiting-rankings-do-they-matter-1