A couple of years ago, we ran an article titled "Naming VT’s Top Gun
Recruiter," a piece that reviewed the players signed by various VT
assistant coaches from 1998-2003, then named Jim Cavanaugh as VT’s "Top
Gun" recruiter, beating out Bryan Stinespring and Charley Wiles. The award
was an overall award, but I got to thinking, why not hand out the Top Gun award
every year? And why not make it strictly numbers-based?

For five years now, we have been producing TSL Pass articles "Inside the
Numbers: Ranking the Recruits" (click
here for the 2005 version) that use various ranking services (SuperPrep,
Rivals.com, and Scout.com) to assign numerical scores for each incoming recruit.
Recruits get a maximum of 15 points from each service and can score as high as
45 points total.

It seems a natural extension of those rankings to total them up according to
VT recruiting coach, assigning points to each coach for the recruits they
signed, then see which coach gets the most points … and name him the Top Gun
recruiter for that year. We have five years of "Ranking the Recruits"
data, so not only can we name the Top Gun for 2005, but we can go back for five
years and hand out the award.

(As a sidebar, we have written articles ranking recruits in two ways: when
they sign and after their VT careers are over. The first way is the
"Ranking the Recruits" articles described above, where scores are
assigned based on recruiting service rankings, before the recruit starts their
VT career. The second way is with our "Ranking
the Recruiting Classes" articles, which assign points to players based
on what they accomplished during their VT careers. Less than a year from now,
for the first time ever, we’ll be able to compare pre-career "Ranking the
Recruits" scores for a class to their post-career "Ranking the
Recruiting Classes" scores, for the 2001 recruiting class. As soon as the
2006 NFL Draft is conducted, we’ll have pre- and post-career numbers for the
2001 class, and that’s when the fun starts of seeing which 2001 recruits met
expectations, which ones were busts, and which ones were sleepers.)

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