Texas, my class, and the recruits who didn't make it
Texas came out lowest among Power programs at turning its recruits into NFL players. I was one of those recruits.
- Position
- Offensive line
- Class
- 2009
- Size
- 6′6″, 290
- Signed with
- Texas
- Chance of making the NFL
- 56%
- Made the NFL
- No
A week or so back I took a flyer on letting AI run an analysis from soup to nuts, on a silly question a former teammate asked me. You can read about it here. Without rehashing all of it, I wanted to know how well the Power programs (the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and ACC, plus Notre Dame) turn high school recruits into NFL players.
My hypothesis was that everyone would cluster around average. Then every version Claude showed me had my alma mater doing badly at it for the better part of a decade, and I'm still trying to reason my way into whether it was really as bad as it looks.
I should say up front that I'm on that list: Texas recruits who didn't pan out include me. But data analysis isn't a hobby for me either; it's how I put food on the table. So I took a closer look myself, to see whether there was some obvious flaw in the method, or whether Dario Amodei is a closeted OU fan who taught Claude to smear UT. I can't confirm or deny the second one. It probably doesn't matter. Texas really did fall short of its recruits' ratings, and with a miss this big, boiling it down to one cause (overrated recruits, one bad coaching hire, culture) is cope. Here's what convinced me this is worse than a C-minus. It's an F.
The method, briefly: every recruit gets an expected chance of making the NFL from his rating, position, size and class year. Making it counts as 1 and not making it as 0, and his result is that minus his chance.
My expected chance was 56%. I didn't make it, so I count against Texas by a little more than half an NFL player. A three-star who beats long odds counts for almost a whole one. A program's score adds up every recruit it signed, and each program is compared with the average program in its tier.
A run of classes, not one bad year
One class is mostly luck. A class only expects a handful of NFL players, so two or three either way can be chance. Six in a row is something else.
Players who transferred are split by seasons on each roster, so counts have decimals. Brackets show the head coach who signed each class.
Every class from 2009 through 2014 fell short. Together they produced 15 fewer NFL players than their ratings said they would. The six classes since came out about 4 ahead. Those six early classes are why Texas comes out last.
The four-stars didn't become NFL players
Most of the shortfall comes from highly rated recruits. Across the 2009–2014 classes, 24% of Texas's four- and five-stars made the NFL. Their ratings said 41%. Programs that signed the same kind of player in the same years did a lot better.
Alabama and LSU signed players like ours and got more out of them than the ratings promised. Georgia and USC got about what was promised. Texas got about three fifths of what was promised.
Was it just high expectations?
The obvious defense is that Texas recruited so well nobody could have lived up to it. Texas did recruit extremely well: 89 of its 125 high school signees in those classes were four- or five-stars, and by the ratings its classes were the 3rd most promising of the 65 Power programs. But high expectations don't explain the miss. The other programs at the top of that list mostly met or beat their ratings, and comparing recruits with the same rating, Texas fell short at every level.
| Rating | Texas | Predicted | Other Power programs | Predicted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5-star | 46% | 60% | 77% | 61% |
| High 4-star | 22% | 61% | 52% | 61% |
| Mid 4-star | 20% | 45% | 38% | 43% |
| Low 4-star | 25% | 32% | 32% | 31% |
| 3-star or less | 10% | 19% | 16% | 14% |
High school recruits, credited by seasons on each roster. Texas has about ten players in each of the top two rows, so those percentages move a lot on one career; the direction is the same in every row.
The gap is widest at the top of the table. Elsewhere, five-stars made the NFL more often than their ratings said they would. At Texas they made it less often, and high four-stars made it at about a third of their predicted rate.
Up front, at linebacker and out wide
The miss isn't spread evenly, and it isn't that linemen are a hard position to evaluate. Across all Power programs in those years, four- and five-star offensive linemen made the NFL slightly more often than their ratings predicted, 39% against 37%. Texas was the outlier.
Against the other Power programs, Texas had the lowest result at offensive line and the lowest at linebacker. My position is the worst one on that chart, and it didn't recover right away: the highly rated offensive linemen in the later classes also fell short. Each of these groups is a dozen or so players, so one or two careers either way would move a dot a long way.
Finishing last at two positions over the same six classes is hard to put down to luck.
The coaches
The model can also score each head coach's stretch at a program. Mack Brown's last five seasons, 2009 to 2013, score lower than any Power head coach's stretch in the data: about 10 fewer NFL players per 100 recruits than their ratings predicted. Charlie Strong's three seasons can't be told apart from average, and Tom Herman's came out about even. Steve Sarkisian's classes are too young to score.
I'd be careful with that. A coach's score here mostly reflects the program he led, and the data can't separate a coach from the school he's at. The players in my class were coached by more than one staff.
Could it be the method?
I went looking for a way out, and found three honest caveats. None of them changes the direction within the Power tier, though last place is less certain than it looks.
- It isn't a sure last. Texas has the lowest score of the 65 Power programs, but with the uncertainty in the numbers its rank could be anywhere from 44th to 65th.
- Nationally, it's within the margin of error. Measured against every program in the country instead of just Power programs, Texas's shortfall can't be told apart from what its ratings predicted. It stands out among Power programs because the programs it recruits against mostly beat their ratings while it fell short.
- It isn't inflated ratings. One easy explanation is that Texas high-school recruits get overrated because the state is scouted so heavily. The numbers don't back that. Once you account for where they played, Texas-born recruits made the NFL at about the rate their ratings predicted, and TCU and Baylor recruit the same high schools and beat their ratings.
Along the way I also found a matching bug that had counted several drafted Texas players from 2006 and 2007 as misses. It's fixed, and those older classes are no longer part of the ranking; I use them only as a rough check further down.
A drought, not the norm
Was Texas always like this? Counting NFL draft picks by college, which needs no recruit matching at all, says no. In the 2000s Texas had 13 first-round picks. Then the classes from 2009 to 2014 reached the draft, and between 2011 and 2022 it had 2.
Draft picks only, by the college nflverse lists; players who made a roster undrafted aren't counted here.
The bottom of it lines up with the classes in this story: no picks at all in 2014, one each in 2016 and 2017, none again in 2022. Then the program came back hard, with 23 players taken in the 2024 and 2025 drafts alone. So the grade below is for an era, not for the program as a whole.
Why?
My first suspect was the staff. After the 2010 season, Mack Brown replaced almost his entire coaching staff. If that broke player development, the classes the old staff developed should look fine and the slide should start with the players the new staff inherited. It doesn't.
I went back to the three classes before 2009. They can only be measured roughly: the rosters from those seasons are thin, so each player counts for the school that signed him. They fell short too: 25% of their four- and five-stars made the NFL against 38% predicted, the lowest of any Power program over those classes. That's the same rate as the classes after the overhaul (26% against 40%). And it happened while Texas was winning: those were the players on the team that went 12–1 in 2008 and played Alabama for the national title after the 2009 season.
So the shortfall doesn't follow either staff. It runs from 2006 through 2014, across both of Mack Brown's staffs and the class Charlie Strong signed weeks after taking over, and it ends with Strong's first full class, 2015, the first to come out ahead. That points at something that stayed the same across those years: how Texas picked its recruits, how it developed them once they arrived, or the culture around the program. The numbers can't tell those apart. They only say it wasn't one staff, and it wasn't one class.
It's an F
The single-cause stories don't hold up. Overrated recruits: TCU and Baylor recruit from the same high schools and beat their ratings. The 2011 staff overhaul: the classes before it fell short by as much as the classes after it. One position: it's the offensive line, linebackers and receivers at once. A miss that wide, for that long, is a program missing, not one decision.
Most recruits anywhere don't make the NFL, and most of the guys I came in with didn't either. That isn't the grade. The grade is that for six straight classes Texas got about three fifths of what its four- and five-star recruits were supposed to become, while Alabama, LSU, Ohio State, Georgia and USC, signing the same kind of player, got all of it or more. Since then it has looked like an average Power program. For 2009 to 2014, and as best I can tell the three classes before them, it's an F.
Found this useful or want to push back on it? Say hi.