Aubserver Mailbag 164: How is Auburn doing in the Blue-Chip Ratio?

This week: Recruiting territory, home-and-homes, deadline days, Johni Broome, The Masters, summer movies and walk-up songs

(Austin Perryman/Auburn Tigers)

Welcome back to The Aubserver Mailbag. We’ve got a lot to get to this week, between several football recruiting questions and some major basketball roster hypotheticals.

Plus, it’s Masters weekend. No time for a long intro.

Let’s go.

Where does Auburn stand now with the blue-chip ratio? How are transfers figured in now for the ratio?

Allentown Tiger

The Blue-Chip Ratio has been a go-to topic in the mailbag for years, and for good reason. The BCR, invented by 247Sports’ Bud Elliott, shows the teams that have the baseline talent to win a national championship. Since the dawn of the BCS, no team that has signed fewer blue-chip players (5- and 4-stars) than 3-star and lower recruits over the last four classes have won it all.

Elliott updates the BCR each summer, so we’re probably a couple of months away from the official numbers. But I went back and tried to come up with a number for Auburn. While the transfer portal has dramatically changed college football, the BCR is still based on what teams sign out of high school and JUCO over the last four cycles. That may change in the future, as Elliott has said, with more data on transfers.

Auburn has signed 77 players from high school and junior college over the last four years (2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024). According to the 247Sports Composite, 55.26% of those players were ranked as 5-stars or 4-stars. That means, by the straightforward definition, Auburn will stay in the BCR for the 2024 season.

Hugh Freeze and his staff have made it clear that they want to rebuild the Tigers through recruiting instead of relying heavily on the portal. In the 2024 cycle, they put their money where their mouths were — 75% of Auburn’s 20 signees were composite 5- or 4-stars. That’s a significant jump from where the Tigers were in the Bryan Harsin era.

• 2024: 75%

• 2023: 47.62%

• 2022: 58.82%

• 2021: 38.89%

The good news for Auburn is that the 2021 class — which has one player that stayed, Jarquez Hunter — only counts toward the BCR one more time. Once that drops off, the Tigers should be able to climb higher. Last season, Auburn was No. 16 out of 16 teams in the BCR. While that’s a good place to be in when compared to the rest of college football, it was No. 8 out of teams in the new 16-team SEC.

Fortunately for the Tigers, it appears that the Freeze tenure is going to be a large step back in the right direction when it comes to talent acquisition. Even with the massive attrition in the 2021 and 2022 classes, more than 70% of the blue-chips that Auburn has signed in the last four cycles are currently on the 2024 roster. And a 2025 class that currently ranks No. 7 nationally is exactly 70% made up of blue-chips.

Now, let’s look at transfers. Elliott counted incoming transfers to a special BCR last year, and he noted that the majority of teams went down in the ratio when you added those players. Auburn fell from 51% to 47%. That makes sense, as over the last couple of offseasons, Auburn had to rely more on transfers who weren’t big-name recruits in order to get closer to a full roster. When you don’t recruit well initially and have to make up for it with transfers, your overall talent usually goes down.

By my math, if you add the high school and JUCO ratings of incoming transfers from the last four cycles, Auburn’s Blue Chip Ratio dips to 46.28%. Considering the likes of Alabama and Georgia are well over 75% in terms of the BCR most seasons, you can understand why Auburn wants to go with the longer-term view of high school recruiting over the shorter-term buzz of the transfer portal.

Auburn still has a lot of work to do as a program in order to gain ground on its rivals — and the return of recruiting success needs to come with on-field improvement sooner rather than later. But it’s extremely difficult to compete at the highest level without blue-chip talent. Freeze and his staff are delivering on what Auburn wanted when its leadership made the decision to hire him after the 2022 season.

How has the composition of the football roster changed over the last few years (more local area players, fewer Florida players?) and does this change mean anything?

John