Football recruiting – the one topic that can lead to endless debate since no true winners or losers exist when looking at the signings on the first Wednesday in February. Players that signed elsewhere suddenly become “overrated” and sleepers are bountiful in every school’s recruiting class. Every fan has his or her favorite players and each class seemingly will have the answers for the team’s current weaknesses. Many signees will have an immediate chance for helping in the eyes of fans, no matter how unrealistic those expectations may actually be. Rankings of players will be mulled over and the “astrology” buffs will be counting stars in an attempt to see the recruiting class in the brightest light possible.

Recruiting has been a natural topic for message boards since so many opinions exist and no true means for evaluating and comparing recruiting classes has been developed. However, there is one simple means for comparing recruiting classes that, while statistically not valid, does provide a quantitative means for comparing the signing classes of different schools.

Why not look at the players offered by two schools and then compare the number that signed with each? If Virginia Tech and Virginia offered 43 common players and 11 signed with Tech as opposed to 5 signing with UVA, wouldn’t it seem that VT won the recruiting battle head-to-head? Maybe or maybe not, but at least it provides a quantitative method for comparison.

This article is the first of a series of four that takes a more quantitative look at recruiting and may lead to some interesting conclusions when looking at Virginia Tech’s football recruiting. In this article, I will take a comparative look at how Tech stacks up against its recruiting competition head-to-head. The second article will provide an analysis of recruiting by location and regional trends. The third article will provide a positional analysis of recruiting classes and ability to meet recruiting needs, while the fourth article presents a quantitative analysis of the current (2005) recruiting class and provides an evaluation of Tech’s success in meeting current needs.

Data from the last four years will be used to provide some comparison over time and to see if Tech’s recruiting patterns have changed since acceptance into the ACC. If nothing else, the different statistics will provide some new data for debate.

In this article (and the ones that follow), I discuss recruiting years in terms of the school year. For example, while most people would refer to the "2005 recruiting class," I call it the "2004-05" recruiting class, culminating in signing day in February 2005. Some players now graduate early and enroll in the spring semester, so I wanted to be technically correct and mention the school year.

So, how did Tech do head-to-head against their new ACC brethren in 2004-05 recruiting? Head-to-head Tech was 63-32 against ACC teams and did not have a losing record against any other ACC school. Obviously, winning the ACC championship translated over to recruiting. In fact, Tech only lost the head-to-head recruiting battle with three schools (Ohio State [1-2], Auburn [1-2], and Georgia [2-3]) in which more than one player signed with either school. Based on a head-to-head comparison, Tech enjoyed an exceptional recruiting class.

Looking at the head-to-head comparison may disprove some common perceptions on recruiting as well. UVA is Tech’s biggest recruiting competition, right? Well, based on the most common offers, Virginia would actually be third. North Carolina has had the most common offers over the last two years (2003-04 and 2004-05) and Maryland is second. The fourth team this year – Syracuse – surprised me, since the Orange are obviously not in the same geographic region, though the state of Virginia has become a targeted area for the Cuse. N.C. State was fifth, followed closely by long-time recruiting foe Tennessee.

The following table displays the head-to-head records for all schools offering the same players as Virginia Tech in the last year. The “Won” column indicates the number of players offered by an opposing school that signed with Tech. The “Lost” column shows the number of players signing with the opposing school that VT had offered. The “Neither” column displays common offers for players that signed with another school. Note that not all known offers are reported, so the records cannot be complete as to total offers. Also, only written “official” offers are counted based on recruiting reports. If doubt exists as to an offer, then I tend to be conservative on counting the offer.

Obviously, Tech did very well last year, but the record that jumped out at me was how well the Hokies did against the Big East schools (28-3), so the move to the ACC had a big impact on recruiting against the Hokies' former conference.

Now to put this year’s recruiting record in perspective, I have compiled the head-to-head records for the last four years to look more closely at recent trends in recruiting for Virginia Tech.