Alabama football fans who have followed the Blue-Chip Ratio (BCR) for the last several years understand its value. More accurate than not, it defines how much roster talent affects making the CFB Playoff and winning a National Championship.
It is a creation of Bud Elliott of 247Sports and the 2022 version is in the link above. Elliott’s calculation is that 15 FBS teams have the requisite talent to win the 2022 National Championship.
Several weeks ago, Bama Hammer published a claim that in almost every season, no more than six teams can win a National Championship. Elliott’s conclusions have merit because he uses more objective data and he also lists teams by roster potential, whereas our smaller subset of teams comes from actual game performance. The result is his list will always be longer and will include teams that will end up being, at best, pretenders rather than contenders.
The basis of Elliott’s data is individual player rankings when they were recruits. In summary, he explains,
"Put simply, to win the national championship, college football teams need to sign more four- and five-star recruits (AKA “Blue Chips”) than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes."
Elaborating on using recruiting rankings, Elliott stated,
"Recruiting rankings are not perfect. But they are damn good, especially in the aggregate. Four- and five-star recruits are about 10 times more likely to be drafted in the first round than their two- and three-star counterparts. And five-stars are about 33 times more likely to be All-Americans as two-stars are."
His analysis shows almost all CFB Playoff participants and all the National Champions going back to 2011 had high BCR percentages. Outliers in the data are Florida State in 2013 (53%) and Clemson in 2016 (52%). All the other champions were from 61% to a high of 83% from Alabama Football in 2020.
Alabama Football and 14 other 2022 teams
Blue Chip Ratio – 2022 Season
- Alabama – 89%
- Ohio State – 80%
- Georgia – 77%
- Oklahoma – 71%
- Texas A&M – 70%
- Texas – 68%
- LSU – 66%
- Clemson – 63%
- Notre Dame – 62%
- Florida – 60%
- Oregon – 60%
- Michigan – 59%
- Penn State – 55%
- Miami – 55%
- Auburn – 54%
How do transfers affect the calculation? For the first time, the 2022 calculation is adjusted to include transfers instead of just traditionally recruited and signed, scholarship players.
Alabama Football is the only program that transfers increased the BCR percentage. The Tide moved from 89% to 90%. Georgia, Michigan and Florida were unchanged. Taking the biggest hits from the Transfer Portal were Miami and Oklahoma, whose BCRs dropped by 6%. Oregon and Auburn had 4% drops.
Based on the percentages after transfers and the data collected on National Champions, Miami and Auburn should be deleted from the original list of 15 teams. Even 13 is too many but Elliott’s analysis is worthwhile.
Elliott cautions to not use the BCR to predict the outcome of any game. It is not designed for that purpose.