College football recruiting: WSU Cougars shoot up national rankings

Tuesday was the wildest days in WSU football recruiting that any of us can remember, as the Cougars picked up commitments from four prospects, including consensus four-star linebacker Kyahva Tezino and one of the top JUCO safeties the country, Shalom Luani.

It actually was the continuation of what has been a wild couple of weeks for WSU. When Riverside Community College cornerback Treshon Broughton flipped from Oregon State to WSU, he was the Cougars' first commitment in nearly two months; since then, WSU has picked up a whopping 10 commitments, including five in the past 24 hours.

As you might expect, such a haul has sent WSU soaring up the various national recruiting rankings. But how high? A lot higher than WSU has been in some time.

247sports

Of all the rating systems, I tend to like 247's the best: They utilize a composite system that weights the evaluation of a player from the four recruiting services equally. Multiple evaluation models are always going to be better than one, and besides: They also use an interesting algorithm to formulate their class rankings. And goodness knows, I love interesting algorithms!

WSU shot up from 40th to 32nd after today's action, and that's without the inclusion of the pair of commitments from American Samoa (Logan Tago and Amosa Sakaria):

The Cougs also rate sixth in the Pac-12 after having passed Arizona. Compare this to finishes of 58, 54 and 54 in Leach's first three seasons, which rated 12th, 11th and 9th in the conference.

Rivals

Rivals only awards points for the top 20 commits with a point system that's actually fairly granular based on their "score" for a recruit; it also awards bonuses for players on their "Rivals 250." I actually like both of those things, because it accounts for differences in class sizes, recognizes that not all "three-star" kids are created equal, and accounts for the fact that impact players can have an outsized effect (in a good way) on a class.

I don't know where WSU was before today, but I know the Cougs are now up to 31st nationally and 6th in the Pac-12:

Leach ranked 56th, 53rd and 70th in his first three years and 12th, 10th and 12th in the conference.

Scout

Scout's rating system counts the top 25 players and awards a set number of points based on the number of stars assigned to a player, then also adds bonus points for a player's ranking within his position set. (Many players, however, are not ranked.)

WSU is now up to 30th:

Leach ranked 50th, 45th and 58th in his first three seasons, good for 12th, 9th and 10th in the Pac-12.

Of course, this is all fairly preliminary. There remains the possibility that some of these commits don't hold -- there's still nearly two months until signing day -- but there also is the possibility that a guy such as four-star Austin Joyner rejoins the class and boosts it even further. (And, in the case of Scout, you can see teams with fewer commits and thus fewer accumulated points lurking in the background.)

Regardless, it's obvious that barring something crazy falling apart, this almost certainly will be Mike Leach's finest class of his four in Pullman. It could even end up being WSU's top class ever.