HERO Sports Top 50 Recruiting Classes & Top 300 Recruits

[FUwolfpacker]

Furman claims the #2 spot in the HERO Sports class ranking behind only JMU. Furman ranked 16th last year in this same ranking.

https://herosports.com/fcs/football-202 ... kings-ajaj

SoCon schools in the top 50
2. Furman
20. UTC
26. Mercer
30. Wofford
31. ETSU
49. WCU
50. Samford

HERO Sports also released their top 300 recruits today.
https://herosports.com/fcs/football-202 ... kings-ajaj

Wofford had the top rated player at #24 Chuck Smith. The next highest rated SoCon guys were #53 Trey Richburg (ETSU) and #73 Evan DiMaggio.

Furman signees in the top 300
73. Evan Dimaggio
92. Dylan Davis
112. Bailor Hughes
118. EJ Wilson
130. Ivan Yates
178. Jack Rhodes
180. Blake Hundley
187. Jeremiah Jackson
200. Luke Clark
272. Ty Youngblood

[AstroDin]

BMac doesn't include transfers - add Henderson to this class and it would challenge the Dukes.
I have no issues with the criteria of BMac's rankings but you can whiff on a player like Kendall Thomas.

Thomas is going to be special.

[FUKA61]

Wow-Wow-Wow!!!! What a great class---I imagine the best that we have ever had. Congrats to the coaches and staff and congrats to the young men who chose FU----you made a very wise decision.

[MNORM]

Very exciting to see.
Now let's see how this translates on the field, where it really matters.
In a way, rankings like these should put some additional pressure on the staff to create crooked numbers on the left side of the column and additional dates on the Field House.

[Davemeister]

The Downside: other schools will be afraid to schedule us.

[AstroDin]

IMO - nothing but upside - here is what the FU coaches are doing with this…

[gofurman]

Super impressive. I mean WOW. As others have noted this (in a good way) puts pressure that we should start notching another win or two per year soon.. I get that these guys won't see the field this year. Well, maybe a few. Interesting - the SoCon was not good last year. It wasn't, we all agree on that. Good to see that 7 Socon schools were top 50 .. and that Citadel is NOT on the list !

[AstroDin]

I know this isn't everybody's cup of tea… if you want to know more about the rankings here is the latest podcast where BMac and Sam Herd talk about it: https://herosports.com/fcs/football-201 ... kings-bzbz

One big nugget… BMac says that Furman came very close to taking number 1 from JMU.

[DeepPurple]

Have we ever recruited at this level?

[The Jackal]

Have we ever recruited at this level?

It's an interesting question.

For one, I think the landscape has changed. 20+ years ago, things were different. Furman was basically by itself in the category of private colleges in the south playing championship FCS/IAA football.

Since that time, dozens of programs have entered the market. The demand for quality football players has increased without a corresponding change in the supply.

With Furman specifically, what I am seeing is that we are attacking the recruiting trail with a specific focus on types of players. We appear to be predominately be recruiting against the Ivies and Academies and are landing a high percentage of our targets. For the 2020 class, I believe we had one player - Ambe Caldwell - flip to another program, and that was a MAC school. I do not believe we really lost a single recruiting battle to a conference school.

Shannesy had a good article up the other day on Wofford's recruiting. He said that Wofford, like most programs, has a board where they identify "X" number of prototype players at each position that can meet the school's academic and entrance requirements. I assume Furman has a similar approach.

I think Furman is managing to hit on a lot of players on their board. In recent years, I think we've hit on a much smaller percentage for whatever reason - we'd get some good players, but the depth wouldn't be there. We would have to fill in the gaps with "non-prototype" players or guys that weren't really physical fits for the systems that we wanted to run.

[DeepPurple]

Well said.

[AstroDin]

I'll add — under CCH Furman is more aggressive - I'd give Furman an A on how they build relationships and program relevance through social.

A few examples Evan DiMaggio <> had a lot of offers - pretty much exclusively FBS schools (17 offers) except for Furman. Dylan Davis - it was Iowa St, ILL, Army, Cornell. E.J. Wilson - it came down to FU, Colorado St, Air Force, and Lehigh. Blake Hundley - South Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky.

This staff isn't running from players just because of group of five schools and power five schools are offering. What's changed is in the last two classes we're getting players with numerous FBS offers and to Jackal's point, we've stopped losing players on a regular basis to schools like CHatty and Wofford.