2012 Consensus Recruiting Rankings

Now that Rivals, Scout, and ESPN have all posted a top 100 list for the class of 2012, we figured it was about time to put all of those numbers into one handy-dandy spreadsheet for your consumption.

The top player in the class based on our rankings is either Andre Drummond or Isaiah Austin. Drummond is ranked No. 1 by both Scout and ESPN, but Rivals currently has him third, behind Austin (second on both Scout and ESPN) and Shabazz Muhammad (third on both the other lists). That's about as much of a consensus as you can get with a top three.


Beyond that, however, things get a bit more messy.

Rodney Purvis is fourth in our consensus rankings, but he doesn't crack the top six on any list. Mitch McGary is ranked fourth by ESPN and fifth by Rivals, but 15th by Scout? DaJuan Coleman is ranked fourth by Scout and fifth by ESPN, but 18th by Rivals?

There's plenty of other interesting tidbits in there, but before we get to the chart, a brief explanation of the numbers.

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 125 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 125 recruits in the country. Using that assumption, we can determine that the missing values must be somewhere between 101 and 125, so we used the average for all the missing data points -- 113.

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.

Look at AJ Hammons, the No. 57 player in our rankings. His average ranking is 58.3, but he seems to be a fairly well-known quantity; he's ranked 55th by Rivals, 57th by Scout, and 63rd by ESPN for a deviation of 3.11.

Now take a look at Wannah Bail, the No. 61 player in our rankings. He has an average ranking of just under 63 by the three outlets, but where those rankings land have a much, much bigger variance. Bail is 27th on Scout's top 100, 63rd (right on the average) according to Scout, and barely in the top 100 at 98th according to ESPN.

There is much more room for discussion and interpretation in regards to the future of Bail. He may end up being a star, as top 30 players tend to be, or he could end up dropping out of the top 100 altogether.

Ok, I'm done rambling. Here are the rankings: