The 2017 Patsy Ratings: No. 7, Colgate

I had grown accustomed to the fanfare around the Patsy ratings.

I remembered that year when the Committee had Pitbull perform right by the pool, announcing the winner of that year's Patsies - the Colgate Red Raiders, he erroneously said (by then, they had rebranded to just "Raiders". )

The Walking Dead-colored mascot clad in Maroon embraced Pitbull as the fireworks exploded all around the pool.  The champagne flowed.  Caviar was consumed.  Shoe pastry was eaten.  "Colgate, we were born to be free," Pitbull ad-libbed.

What a difference compared to this year.

The Patsies came in a brown paper bag, thrown under the door of the Committee's offices.  Granted, the bag was thick - it appeared that they indeed did research, more so than the Pitbull years, it seems.  But the fanfare was gone.  All that was left were the numbers.

Here's The Beef

THE GOOD

Colgate is known for hauling in the beef every recruiting class - they like physical linemen and always seem to have a lot of offensive and defensive linemen that have a tendency to become all-Patriot League players.  This class is no exception: 7/21 of them, of 1/3 of the class, were either offensive or defensive linemen.

THE BAD

The original Patsy Rating on this class was much smaller, but one late, starred recruit, taped to a manila folder of a printout of an email, lifted the overall "quality point" total from "concerning" to simply "underwhelming".  That's not to say that the class is necessarily bad, by any stretch - just that, according to the recruiting services, there aren't a lot of starred recruits (and thus, not a lot of Patsy Points generated by the recruiting service "stars").

PATSY POINT CALCULATION
 

CLASS SIZE = 4.   Colgate's final size recruiting class was 21, which yields 4 Patsy points.

A note here on the word "Final."  In years past, the Committee decided to award Patsy Points almost as soon as the official recruiting classes came out.  This both was a blessing - the classes could be rated sooner, and a full offseason could be spent debating the results - and a curse.

The curse was that, inevitably, some All Patriot League player would drop to a team out of the sky after "Signing Day" had occurred.  Or a 4* recruit would ask nicely if they could instead walk on at Kentucky.  This would cause all the Patsy Points to need to be re-computed, and the classes re-ranked... and generally would make the Committee's job a massive headache.

"This is why," an illegible press release said later, "that we decided to move up the Patsy Point calculation days until the summer.  Take Colgate, who added two recruits after signing day that had an enormous impact on their Patsy Point total.  Even though it was more research work to hunt down the Twitter commitments (and in one case wait for the name to show up on the roster), we feel like it was worth it - barely."

QUALITY = 19.   Though 12/21 recruits generated quality points, it's worth of note that a very large percent of them came from one recruit.  That recruit was announced after Signing Day, and inflated this number immensely.

DISTRIBUTION = 8.  All positions except TE were covered in the class, so 8 out a 9 possible points were issued.

SPEED = 5.   Five recruits had speed information published on one or more of the recruiting websites, with three of them able to generate position points for the Raiders.

TRIGGER = 2.   Two quarterbacks were represented in the class, and both were recognized by a the recruiting websites, so two extra Patsy Points were issued.  (Since neither of them were starred recruits, however, this is one area of missed Patsy points that really hurt the Maroons.)

Typical Colgate Lineman

JUMBO = 3.  Of all the statistics, perhaps this was the most surprising - of the seven linemen in the incoming class, only three tipped the scales enough to generate Jumbo points.  In fact, for the first time in a long time, I didn't see any linemen on the Colgate incoming class list that tipped the scales at over 300 lbs.  Now, this could be explained by a desire to recruit lighter, faster linemen - but it's worthy of mention because in years past, this hasn't been the case.

NEEDS = 7 (of 12):  

OL = 2 (of 5).   The Maroons graduated a lot of linemen, so it seemed like this was Colgate's biggest need in the offseason.  Three linemen, none of them starred and only two that barely made "Jumbo Points", made this somewhat of a disappointing meeting of this need.

DB = 2 (of 4).   Similarly, it seemed like the Raiders needed to fill their roster with more defensive backs, but only got depth, not starred recruits.  (Some thought two out of four stars was excessively generous here.)

DL = 3 (of 3).   Of the need areas, this was clearly the best met.  4 recruits, including that late starred recruit, is exactly what the Raiders needed in this area, so they qualified for all the possibly points here.

COMMITTEE ADJUSTMENT: 

Though the class didn't look like a typical Colgate class, the grading of their incoming class seemed fair - no wacky outliers in terms of points or rankings.  That translated into no adjustment positive or negative.

COMMITTEE ADJUSTMENT: 0

COLGATE - 48