Recruiting Arizona – Part V

This is the fifth and final article of our five-part series examining the high school football talent from the state of Arizona. The first four articles analyzed the Arizona high school recruits from the classes signed in February 2010, 2011 and 2012 and 2013 determining how well these recruits have performed, so far, during their college football careers. This last article in the series will be analyzing last year’s 2014 Arizona recruiting class. This group of recruits would be freshman that either played or redshirted during this past 2014 season, thus this group has only one year of college football experience.

The Recruits

There were 32 recruits analyzed from the 2014 state of Arizona class, with only 27 of them signing commitments to D-1 schools. Three ended up being asked to greyshirt in 2014, while one decided to go on a church mission before playing, and another decided to walk on at ASU instead of signing with an Ivy League school. Of the 32 recruits, the Scout.com recruiting service rated two of them as elite five-star recruits, five as four-star recruits, 16 were rated as three-stars recruits, while nine of them were rated as only two-star recruits. Seven of the recruits were not assigned a position ranking. The group was weighted heavier towards the offensive side of the ball with 20 offensive players and 12 defensive players. Over 50 percent of the recruits, signed with a Pac-12 team, while about 25 percent signed with a Mountain West team. One of the recruits signed with a service academy, while another recruit signed with BYU. Five recruits signed with a Power 5 conference team; two with Texas A&M, two with Oklahoma and one with Florida.

ASU only signed three recruits from the 2014 class, while Arizona signed four. Both schools asked one recruit each to greyshirt during the 2014 season. As far as the rest of the Pac-12, three recruits signed with Stanford, two each signed with Oregon and Cal, while one signed with Oregon State.

Two of the recruits did not qualify out of high school, and thus, are not with the programs they originally sign with, Natrell Curtis with Oklahoma and Dionte Sykes with San Diego State. Five of the recruits became contributors on their teams in their very first year of college football. Several of the players on the recruiting spreadsheet show up as being on their team’s roster, but not of the depth chart. For that reason, it can be assumed that these players were redshirted during the season, but since no actual published confirmation on this could be found, they are not being classified as 2014 redshirts on the spreadsheet.

It’s very early in their careers, so it’s not too surprising that none of the recruits have earned all conference honors yet. All three of recruits signed by ASU in 2014 redshirted this past season. Three of the four Wildcat recruits ended up cracking into the two-deep depth chart for Arizona. Trevor Wood registered four solo tackles in 2014 and Cameron Denson registered 18 total tackles.

A total of 26 recruits were from the metro Phoenix area, while six hailed from southern Arizona. Additionally, five of the recruits were from Hamilton High School in Chandler. There was a total of five different high schools that placed two players each into the top 32 recruits in 2014.

That’s it for looking at each of the recruiting years individually. We are planning to do a complete analysis of all five years combined to get a broader picture of what a five-year recruiting class in Arizona would look like. In the meantime, here are the links to the past four Arizona recruiting articles:

Part I: The 2010 Recruiting Class

Part II: The 2011 Recruiting Class

Part III: The 2012 Recruiting Class

Part IV: The 2013 Recruiting Class

* At the time of this post there was no guarantee that Santana Sterling would join the program this spring.  Counts based on last public announcement by ASU.