National Signing Day, a holiday among college football fans, is tomorrow and hundreds of high school seniors will decide where they will play football for the next three to five years.
Players will sign in all different ways. Some will flip from one school to another, some will sign with the team they have been committed to for three years, some will pick a school no one thought was still in it. Expect the unexpected with National Signing Day. However, there is one thing that is guaranteed; Mississippi State will finish in the bottom half of the SEC, and honestly that is okay.
According to 247sports.com’s composite rankings, MSU is currently ninth in the SEC and even if D.D. Bowie flips to MSU and Willie Gay picks MSU, MSU still would just barely crack the top half of the SEC at seventh. That is also assuming Florida or South Carolina, who are seventh and eighth in the SEC, do not pick up any new players, which they will.
At the end of the day though, recruiting rankings are just a projection and sometimes they can be wrong. MSU fans have been harping on the bad recruiting MSU had in the Dan Mullen era for years, when they just need to trust the staff. This staff has proven its ability to find the 3-star ranked diamond in the rough.
The biggest example is and always will be Dak Prescott. Prescott is the undisputed greatest player in MSU football history. Prescott was ranked as the 643rd player in the country his senior year of high school and was ranked 24th in Louisiana.
He was part of the 2011 recruiting class, which was ranked 10th in the SEC and 35th in the country. That class was the class that led MSU to a No. 1 ranking for five weeks and finished as one of the best classes in school history.
Also in that class was 2-star recruit Preston Smith. Smith now plays defensive end for the Washington Redskins and was voted as one of the best players under-25 by NFL.com. He was ranked 1239th in the country.
To compare to the other end of the spectrum, Texas had the fourth ranked class in 2011 and finished with a 6-7 record in 2014 when MSU went 10-3.
Now I am not saying recruiting rankings do not matter. Alabama had the No. 1 ranked recruiting class for six straight years and they will make seven straight tomorrow. What I am saying is people put way to much stock into them and worry way to much about where their team is ranked.
Trust Dan Mullen and the MSU coaching staff to get the right players for their system. Stars do matter, but not nearly as much as we are led to believe. All stars mean is that the chance of a player being great is higher. Stars do not mean that the team with more 5-stars is always going to win. Unless you are Alabama, but that is dfferent because the rules do not apply to them.
Just do not freak out if Willie Gay decides to go to LSU or Michigan. People tend to forget that these are kids making the biggest decision of their lives. If they choose not to go to MSU it will be fine and Mullen and co. will recover. Also, if you are still reading this column, you clearly care a lot about recruiting. To those people, please for all that is good in the world do not tweet at recruits. Period, for no reason whatsoever, do not tweet at recruits.
