NC State has the 6th Most Talented Team in the ACC According to 247 Composite

I recently stumbled across a feature over at 247Sports that I was unaware of called the “Team Talent Composite”. Baically, it’s purpose is to calculate the talent on the roster of each college football team.

For all of you math junkies, here’s the way they arrived at their calculations.

In order to create the most comprehensive Team Recruiting Ranking without any notion of bias, 247Sports Team Recruiting Ranking is solely based on the 247Sports Composite Rating.

Each recruit is weighted in the rankings according to a GAUSSIAN DISTRIBUTION FORMULA (a bell curve), where a team’s best recruit is worth the most points. You can think of a team’s point score as being the sum of ratings of all the team’s commits where the best recruit is worth 100% of his rating value, the second best recruit is worth nearly 100% of his rating value, down to the last recruit who is worth a small fraction of his rating value. This formula ensures that all commits contribute at least some value to the team’s score without heavily rewarding teams that have several more commitments than others. (247)

According to the 247 Team Talent Composite, NC State has the 6th most talented team in the ACC in 2019, and the 36th most talented team in the nation.

Now, some of you might be uber critical of recruiting rankings, and think they are hogwash. Look, I get it. They aren’t always right.

But let’s face the facts, 6 of the Top-10 most talented teams this year according to 247’s Team Talent Composite rankings are currently ranked in the Top-10 of this weeks AP Poll, and 8 of them are in the Top-13.

If you take a quick glance at the rankings above, one thing is clear. FSU should fire Willie Taggart and hire Dave Clawson.

The Team Talent Composite rankings go back to 2015, and Dave Doeren has been progressively increasing the level of talent on the roster at NC State.

2019: 36th
2018: 41st
2017: 44th
2016: 44th
2015: 43rd

Here’s a look at the talent on NC State’s roster according to how they were rated before they arrived on campus.

(NOTE: The 2nd highest rated player on the roster, Linebacker Vi Jones, is sitting out this year due to transfer rules (USC).)