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The class so far (post-Edmonds)

msqueri

All-American
Gold Member
Jan 5, 2006
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[Updated with new team rankings and a profile on Edmonds]

There is a long way to go in this class, which has 9+ months until Signing Day and is about 1/5 done in terms of eventual commits, but it's an exciting time so I thought I'd take a snapshot of where the class stands today post-Edmonds commitment.

Rivals has Stanford behind only Alabama and Penn State among five person classes and neck-and-neck with Auburn. 247Sports has Stanford, Alabama, and Penn State neck-and-neck for the best five person class in the country. In the overall team rankings, Scout has us at #20, Rivals has us at #20, and 247 has us at #19. [Scout has a blind spot on Edmonds so I'm not sure when they'll adjust the commit list/team rankings.] Heady stuff for us. Given what we know about the board so far and the level of traction with certain recruits, steadily climbing up the team rankings and eventually getting into the bottom half of the top ten seems like a realistic goal. That would be one of our best classes ever and be particularly exciting coming four years after the outstanding 2012 class, relieving some significant pressure on the roster to compensate for the departure of one of our best classes ever. Especially with 2017 looking like a smaller class, it is important for pipeline health not to replace the 2012 class with something significantly inferior. So far so good!

Let's look at the individual recruits we have so far:

QB KJ Costello

247Composite: #33 overall player, #4 pro-style QB
247: #69 overall player, #5 pro-style QB
Rivals: #25 overall player, #2 pro-style QB
Scout: #47 overall player, #3 QB
Offers: Alabama, USC, Michigan, UCLA, Oklahoma, Florida, Florida State, Texas A&M, Miami, Tennessee, Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, Oregon State, Virginia, Boise State
Junior year production: 229 of 380 (60.3%) for
3123 yards, 23 touchdowns, and 10 interceptions (against elite Trinity League competition)

Historical context: One of the top eight Stanford commits in the last eighteen years (the others: Kwame Harris, Michael Craven, Trent Edwards, Julian Jenkins, Kyle Murphy, Andrus Peat, and Solomon Thomas)

TE Kaden Smith

247Composite: #60 overall player, #2 TE
247: #47 overall player, #2 TE
Rivals: #200 overall player, #8 TE
Scout: #46 overall player, #1 TE
Offers: Alabama, LSU, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Arkansas, Auburn, Ole Miss, Michigan, Baylor, Clemson, Miami, Tennessee, Houston
Junior year production: 35 catches for 540 yards (sophomore year: 40 catches for 640 yards and 8 touchdowns)

Historical context: Most highly-touted tight end commit since at least Teyo Johnson, if you count him as a TE, and that was sixteen recruiting cycles ago; among many top TE recruits since then (Traverso, Lorig, Dray, Reuland, Ertz, Toilolo, Schultz, and arguably Hooper) none have had even close to the profile Smith has, with Schultz being the closest as the 247Composite's #100 overall player in the country (and that's taking Smith's current profile as a given when the fact is that Rivals' absurd rating of him is weighing down his composite big-time and seems extremely likely to be adjusted significantly upward next month in light of Smith winning MVP at a Rivals event)

LB Curtis Robinson

(Also evidently has potential to play WR or S)

247Composite: #110 overall player, #10 OLB
247: #77 overall player, #8 OLB
Rivals: #168 overall player, #15 ATH
Scout: #110 overall player, #9 OLB
Offers: Ohio State, Oklahoma, Georgia, USC, UCLA, Michigan, Notre Dame, Oregon, Texas A&M, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, Colorado, Washington, Washington State, Boston College, Vanderbilt, Duke, Boise State
Junior year production: 25 catches for 252 yards and 1 touchdown; 40 tackles, 4 sacks, 1 interception (against elite Trinity League competition)

Historical context: If he gets into the consensus top 100, which seems likely given some signals from service recruiting analysts that he has an imminent bump coming, he'd join Costello and Smith as the 18th-20th top 100 recruits for Stanford in the last nine recruiting cycles (the others: Murphy, Thomas, Peat, Garnett, Luck, Chryst, Davis, Vaughters, Carter, Irwin, Sanders, Tucker, McCaffrey, Shittu, Skov, Lyons, and Schultz); if he's a linebacker, he's our best since Skov, Vaughters, and Davis

DB Nygel Edmonds

247Composite: #279 overall player, #27 CB
247: #289 overall player, #30 CB
Rivals #141 overall player, #10 CB
Scout: #50 CB
Offers: Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Auburn, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Missouri, South Carolina, Clemson, North Carolina, NC State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Arizona State, Cal, Miami, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Wisconsin, Penn State, Boston College, Duke, Wake Forest, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisville, Western Kentucky, Harvard, Princeton
Junior year production: 14 tackles and 2 interceptions (evidently a shutdown corner at the high school level) - his highlight video also includes 3-4 blocked kicks and is interesting for its inclusion of multiple plays away from the ball

Historical context: His offers are competitive with any DB in our history, with Wayne Lyons perhaps being a good comparison; his recruiting service profile is comparable with guys like Devon Carrington, Brandon Simmons, and Delano Howell, but it is worth noting that his composite ranking is sabotaged by Scout, which appears to have completely forgotten about him in the last eight months, which I believe coincides with the period when he transferred out of football hotbed Georgia to academically-oriented Tennessee boarding school McCallie, which has a poor track record sending players to major college football; it is also worth noting that those comparisons I offered tended toward safety types so it is possible that Edmonds is second only to Frank Buncom IV as an elite cover corner prospect

DT Bo Peek


247Composite: #875 overall player, #52 DT
247: #52 DT
Rivals: #44 DT
Scout: #45 DT
Offers: Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, Ole Miss, Georgia Tech, Penn State, Boston College, Wake Forest, Louisville, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, Indiana, Rutgers, UCF, Vanderbilt, South Florida, Syracuse, Temple, Toledo, Florida Atlantic, UMass
Junior year production: 42 tackles, 3.5 sacks, 23 tackles for loss, 11 QB hurries

Historical context: The optimist in me says similar profile to Ikenna Nwafor and Wesley Annan, which is reinforced in my mind by his very early offer and his good high school production, though we probably need more data points; solid 3-star comparisons for him run the gamut from those two to Geoff Meinken, Anthony Hayes, and J.B. Salem

This post was edited on 4/14 4:10 PM by msqueri
 
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