With regard to recruiting I took a look at Willie's Big Board data and tortured the numbers until they spoke. Rather than post this in the thread that got me to thinking about it, I decided to start a new one here.
After playing around with the data a bit I realized that simply averaging the rankings was misleading. The key to success is stringing together top recruiting classes. So if you lay an egg in there it is not a big deal. It is really about nailing it two or three times in a four year window.
A good Iowa example of this is that they had their best recruiting classes in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 followed by a title in 2021. On the PSU side from 2020 to 2023 they went 7, 1, 22, 2 and we all know how that ended. As for that 22, it was because they had a single recruit. But that single recruit was Levi Haines, so...
Ultimately, I settled on averaging the best three out of four classes for rolling four year windows from 2012 to 2023. Then I determined who had the top 3 classes for those windows.
The results:
Clearly PSU rules the roost on the recruiting trail. Five times they had the best series of recruiting classes (red) and twice they had the second best (blue).
Iowa is mostly third best (green), but overall I would put them behind Oklahoma State, Ohio State, and Cornell.
That Iowa tends to outperform three of the four schools in front of them has to be an endorsement of their coaching at the same time it is a mild indictment of their recruiting.
Oklahoma State suffers the opposite malady. Results that do not live up to their recruiting ranks.
Ultimately these recruiting ranks will need to be updated for transfers. Michigan's ranking ending with 2023 probably moves to around fourth from seventh, for example. Maybe even third.
I cheated a bit on ties.