This post is a collection of the college football teams whose four-year recruiting ranking (going off the 247Sports Composite) most differed from their 2018 finish in S&P+, the opponent-adjusted advanced stat developed by SB Nation’s Bill Connelly. Recruiting rankings are generally predictive at the overall level, but there will always be lots of variances on a team-by-team basis.

S&P+ isn’t meant to be a stand-in for won/loss record, but we like it as a baseline measurement of a team’s down-to-down performance and true caliber. Here’s who was way better than they were supposed to be, who was way worse, and who was pretty much exactly the same.

The eight biggest underachievers, based strictly on four-year recruiting ranking and S&P+ finish

Why eight? Because that’s a natural cutoff based on the pure rankings differences for all the teams. Context follows below.

1. Florida State (4th in recruiting, 84th in S&P+, 5-7)
2. Louisville (32nd in recruiting, 111th in S&P+, 2-10)
3. UCLA (15th in recruiting, 92nd in S&P+, 3-9)
4. Tennessee (13th in recruiting, 88th in S&P+, 5-7)
5. North Carolina (27th in recruiting, 95th in S&P+, 2-9)
6. Oregon State (60th in recruiting, 124th in S&P+, 2-10)
7. (tie) Arkansas (31st in recruiting, 94th in S&P+, 2-10), and Rutgers (53rd in recruiting, 116th in S&P+, 1-11)

There’s almost a perfect line in the recruiting world between Power 5 teams and Group of 5 teams. That leads to this list being exclusively Power 5, because those teams have the longest way to fall unless they’re Kansas State Purdue, Boston College, or Kansas.

FSU has declined badly, though Willie Taggart has plenty of pieces in place to make things better soon. Louisville lost Lamar freaking Jackson and couldn’t deal with its other attrition without him. UCLA has had a lot of weird recruiting misses under Chip Kelly, but the Bruins also had a lot of turnover heading into the year, with Josh Rosen being the most impactful loss. Tennessee had fallen apart by the end of Butch Jones’ tenure.

North Carolina had a bunch of players suspended for long stretches, contributing to its badness. Oregon State, Arkansas, and Rutgers were just bad Power 5 teams who got waxed so thoroughly that they fell to near the bottom in S&P+.

The biggest Group of 5 underachievers by these metrics were UTSA (89th in recruiting, 126th in S&P+, 3-9 record), San Jose State (88th, 125th, 3-9), East Carolina (80th, 110th, 3-9), and nation’s-worst-team UConn (101st, 130th, 1-11).

The nine biggest overachievers, based strictly on four-year recruiting ranking and S&P+ finish

Again, let’s start with the numbers and contextualize later.

1. Appalachian State (119th in recruiting, 11th in S&P+, 11-2)
2. Utah State (106th, 19th in S&P+, 11-2)
3. Fresno State (87th in recruiting, 9th in S&P+, 12-2)
4. Ohio (111th in recruiting, 35th in S&P+, 9-4)
5. North Texas (107th in recruiting, 34th in S&P+, 9-4)
6. Buffalo (125th in recruiting, 58th in S&P+, 10-4)
7. Eastern Michigan (123rd in recruiting, 62nd in S&P+, 7-6)
8. (tie) Troy (98th in recruiting, 40th in S&P+, 10-3), and UCF (66th in recruiting, 8th in S&P+, 12-1)

This whole list is comprised of awesome Group of 5 teams, which is again owed to the vast recruiting gulf between the powers and the non-powers. Obviously, it’s more than fair to consider UCF a bigger overachiever for almost going undefeated the second year in a row than Ohio was for putting together a nice MAC season. But in terms of punching above their weight classes, nobody did a better job in 2018 than this group.

The biggest Power 5 overachievers were Syracuse (59th in recruiting, 36th in S&P+, a 10-3 record), Iowa (44th, 22nd, 9-4), Virginia (58th, 37th, 8-5), and Utah (36th, 16th, 9-5).

The 10 teams that were pretty much exactly what they were supposed to be, at least per S&P+

Arbitrarily, this means teams whose four-year recruiting rank and S&P+ finish were within three spots of each other. I’m not putting them in any particular order:

• Alabama (1st in recruiting, 1st in S&P+, 14-1)
• Minnesota (49th in recruiting, 49th in S&P+, 7-6)
• Florida (14th in recruiting, 13th in S&P+, 10-3)
• FIU (86th in recruiting, 85th in S&P+, 9-4)
• Georgia (5th in recruiting, 3rd in S&P+, 11-3)
• Kent State (118th in recruiting, 120th in S&P+, 2-10)
• Penn State (12th in recruiting, 14th in S&P+, 9-4)
• Texas A&M (16th in recruiting, 18th in S&P+, 9-4)
• Tulane (84th in recruiting, 86th in S&P+, 7-6)
• UTEP (126th in recruiting, 128th in S&P+, 1-11)

Congrats to these programs for being relentlessly themselves. To answer one question I had myself, Clemson’s not here because the Tigers are No. 6 in four-year recruiting and No. 2 in S&P+. The computers like Alabama by a smidgen in a hypothetical rematch at a neutral site.

The 130-team breakdown in one big table, in case your team didn’t show up on one of those lists