Clemson football: The best recruiting classes in the 2023 cycle

Clemson football recruiting is a year round enterprise even though there are a lot of NFL observers that don’t want to even speculate about draft picks until the players have a few years under their belts. Similarly, many college football people will wait until a recruiting class has cycled through and graduated before passing judgement.

Then you have people like me that won’t even wait until the classes are complete to start ranking them.

Actually, there are a lot of people these days who are like me. College football recruiting has exploded from being a niche industry to being the primary subject matter of the offseason. Rivals (Tiger Illustrated), 247 Sports (Clemson 247), ESPN, On3 (Clemson Sports) and Sports Illustrated (AllClemson.com) are companies that follow recruiting in depth with team and player rankings.

It might seem premature to start ranking classes in the summer, but it isn’t that crazy. The creation of the Early Signing Period in December started a trend of recruits making verbal commitments earlier in the calendar. Then the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the entire recruiting calendar for nearly a year and a half. I’m not sure I can explain why, but that ‘dead period’ further increased the trend towards earlier decisions. Many players want to get the recruiting process out of the way before their senior high school football season begins. That’s why Clemson started entertaining official visits in the summer for the first time in the Dabo Swinney era – a lot of good players don’t want to wait until fall to take an official visit.

The 247 Composite Score is a decent way to quickly look at the rankings. Its not perfect but it is a lot quicker than researching every single website to figure out where every recruit is ranked. Even then, 247 calculates a team’s total score based on quantity and quality. They are correct to not dismiss quantity – sometimes a 3-star guy can make a big impact – but often a small class with 5-star & 4-star recruits can be much more impactful to a program than a large class of mostly 3-star recruits. If those highly rated recruits are at key positions, especially quarterback, then they can be very impactful.

Considering all of that, here is where I see the top programs’ classes are ranked right now. Recruiting never truly rests, so if you see any mistakes, it’s entirely likely there have been new commitments or de-commitments since I wrote this. It can be hard to keep up.