2011 Consensus Recruiting Rankings: Final

Rivals, Scout, and ESPN have all released their final Class of 2011 recruiting rankings, which means that it is time for us to update our consensus recruiting rankings.

We've done this twice before, prior to the July 2010 recruiting period and then once then again after ESPN, Scout, and Rivals all updated their rankings after July. In the process, we've seen three different players sitting at No. 1 overall -- as Michael Gilchrist, Austin Rivers, and now Anthony Davis were all thought at one time to be the best recruit in the country.


The way the players are ranked are fairly obvious -- their average ranking between the three outlets, which is the value listed under average (duh). The issue we ran into came with the kids that are not listed on all three sites. In total, there were 121 players that were listed on at least one of the top 100 lists, which means that this is more or less a list of the consensus top 121 recruits in the country. Using that assumption, we can determine that the missing values must be somewhere between 101 and 121, so we used the average for all the missing data points -- 111.

We also determined the average deviation from the mean (not to be confused with the standard deviation, which wouldn't make much sense considering we only have three data points for each players), which essentially shows the variance in the rankings for each prospect. The way we got this number was to determine the difference between each specific ranking and that player's average ranking and averaging the three values together (listed on the spreadsheet as Rivals/SD, Scout/SD, and ESPN.SD) to get the number listed below DEV.

For example, take a look at Sidiki Johnson, 85th in our rankings, and Rodney Cooper, who is 92nd. Johnson has an average ranking of 87.0 while Cooper checks in at 90.33. On the surface, it doesn't appear as if there is much difference between the two as a prospect. Johnson's average deviation, however, is only 3.33. He's ranked 84th by Rivals, 85th by Scout, and 92nd by ESPN. Cooper's average deviation is 27.56. He's ranked 49th by Rivals, but he doesn't crack the top 100 in either ESPN or Scout's rankings.

Now that we've gone through all of that, here is the spreadsheet we put together: