Here's a couple interesting to me comparisons:
Top 10 Comparison
2023
2024
5*s
6
4
#10 Rating
0.971
0.9606
(in '23, #15 was rated .9606)
#10 Natl. Ranking
62
73
At first glance, pretty close, especially since Cook became a composite 5* late in the cycle and Owens almost dropped out.
I don't think that the top of the in-state class is as strong as it has been in the past, but we're also working with incomplete data. This could be a super deep class, but without personally watching a zillion hudls, we don't really know. The covid driven, in-person evaluation ban was in place from 3/13/20 - 6/1/21 which had an enormous and obvious impact on the '22 and '23 classes. While '24s have not had "traditional" opportunities to be evaluated taken from them, services and college staffs spent more time on the previous two classes after the ban was lifted, which was imo, at the expense of a full and complete eval of the '24s.
247/on3/Rivals/.........ESPN wouldn't even have a combined headcount that would support evaluating all of the prospects worth evaluating and rating. There are other factors at play here for why a hs prospect may be underrecruited and invisible to the services like saving hs offers for the portal and roster count ambiguity, but we may be looking at a new, shortened timeline of interest for any given class. Despite our collective interest in a 1k class thread of meltdowns, I'm all for a more focused coverage of a prospect cycle. Makes it a lot easier to follow, and I don't spend any time watching the highlights of some unranked Freshman DL from Olney who will absolutely never get an offer.