I don't think it's much of a coincidence that the top teams have, for the most part, also recruited the top talent. But I think it's important to be aware of all the things that go into both recruiting rankings and then total defense.
I don't think it will shock anyone to hear that some recruits get an extra star whenever they commit to a big time school. For example, two recruits are given 3 stars by a recruiting service. One of them commits to Alabama--a team known for putting great defenders on the field; the other commits to Minnesota--a team not known for doing the same. The recruit who committed to Alabama is given 4 stars, while the recruit who committed to Minnesota remains at 3 stars. Why is the recruit who committed to Alabama given that extra star? Is he that much better? Or did he get that extra star because he committed to a school who "has an eye for talent"? There's nothing to conclusively say one way or the other.
Another thing to look at would be the disparity in the rankings of the different recruiting services. While most of the services follow a similar guideline to rank their recruits, some services place a higher emphasis on a certain aspect whereas others focus on a different aspect. So in the end you get a difference in team rankings due to some recruits being ranked higher on some services, and lower on other services. Is the disparity that great? More than likely not, but that depends on how you define significant disparity. Nebraska, for example, finds themselves ranked 38th on 247, 36th on Scout, and 33rd on Rivals. I'm excluding ESPN's rankings because they don't provide rankings beyond 40th, if I remember correctly. So the disparity for lowest to highest is 5 spots, which I suppose you could call significant. I'd be interested in seeing a composite ranking of all three services, and then see how that relates to total defense.
You remember why our 2009 and 2010 defenses were good? The players from our lowly defenses were on the team. It's because the players that were recruited to the program who were now juniors and seniors were the ones seeing the field. I hope I'm getting the point of this across: not all the players from a certain recruiting class see the field at the same time. This year, we had seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen on the field; other years we don't have a single freshman or a single senior on the field. So you're not getting a real representation of the recruiting class to total defense picture. It's obscured by different classes being on the field at the same time.
And we haven't even gotten to the results on the field. Total defense doesn't take into consideration the caliber of the offenses that the team faces. So a defense that ranks in the top 30 could be ranked there because they played offenses who averaged a ranking of lower than 100th.
All of this makes it very difficult to truly represent, or even partly represent the relationship between recruiting rankings and total defense. All of those things (and potentially more) of those variables listed above are confounds.
Apologies if I'm wrong JTrain, but you took a look at scoring and total defense of each team in each respective year as well as the average recruiting ranks of teams in the past 6 years, right? If that's the case, then I think you may be misleading a bit. Why not take the average of the teams' scoring and total defense of the past six years? If you average one thing, doesn't it make sense to average the other thing?
Finally, I think that despite some statistical similarities, the defense we had on the field this year is vastly different than the defenses we fielded the past two seasons. The defenses in the past two seasons were unathletic and experienced. Our defense this year was for the most part athletic and inexperienced. Making up a deficit caused by inexperience is much easier to do than making up a deficit caused by unathleticism. Our defense is going to gain a little bit in athleticism from this year to next, but will gain tremendously in experience from this year to next. I think it's an exciting time for our defense, and for our team in general.
