I wanted to take a quick look at how the major conferences stacked up against each other in this year's recruiting. I broke it down into five categories. For the first two categories, I averaged the results between Scout, Rivals, and ESPN's rankings. These two categories are top 10 and top 25 ranked teams.

For the last three categories, I relied only on Scout's rankings. The rationale being ESPN does not rank beyond the top 25 and Rivals' rankings get shaky after the top teams. The third category is top 40 teams and the fourth category is the number of teams with 3.0 or better 'star average'. The final category is the average ranking of all the teams in a conference. In parentheses is the conference rank. The results:

Conference                  Top 10            Top 25             Top 40             3.0+                 AVG

SEC                             4.66   (1)          7.66   (1)           10   (1)              7  (T1)              23  (1)

PAC 10                        2       (T2)         5        (2)            9    (T2)            7  (T1)              26  (2)

BIG 12                         2       (T2)         4         (3)           9    (T2)            6  (T3)              42  (5)

ACC                             1        (4)          3.66    (4)           5    (T4)            6  (T3)              40  (3)

Big Ten                        .33     (5)           2.66   (5)            5    (T4)            4  (5)                41   (4)

Big East                        0       (6)           .66     (6)           2     (6)             2  (6)                47   (6)

It is inherent that these rankings are flawed to a degree. Not the least of which is the reliance on an inexact science. However, the first four categories are affected by the number of teams in a conference. More teams = a higher chance to have teams ranked highly. For this reason, it is impressive that the Pac-10 was consistently second ahead of several conferences with more teams. The last category is the most telling of overall conference depth. Despite the large number of SEC teams ranked very highly, they just barely bested the Pac-10 in overall depth of recruiting. (Thanks to MattPD for the help)