The Georgia Bulldogs have stacked talented signing class after talented signing class during the Kirby Smart era, and it’s no coincidence that the Bulldogs have asserted themselves as a perennial championship contender. After failing to become the first team in the modern era to win back-to-back-to-back national titles, Georgia’s status as a talent-rich team has not changed, and it has the Bulldogs primed to win it all again in 2024.
Georgia sits third in CBSSports’ Blue-Chip ratio for the 2024 season, as 80% of the Bulldogs’ roster going into this season were four-star or five-star recruits coming out of high school. The only two teams that the Bulldogs trail for the top spot are Ohio State (90%) and Alabama (88%), the same two teams that were first and second on this list a year ago. For reference, the 2023 Blue-Chip ratio had Georgia at 77%, Alabama at 90%, and Ohio State at 85%.
The rest of the top ten consists of Texas A&M (79%), Oregon (76%), Oklahoma (73%), Texas (72%), LSU (70%), Notre Dame (67%), Clemson (64%), Florida (63%), Miami (61%), Penn State (61%), USC (59%), Michigan (56%), and Auburn (53%).
247Sports has recognized and reacted to the explosion of transfers, with the most comprehensive transfer ratings in the industry. We have multiple full-time staff, including some who have worked for college football personnel offices, working on our transfer ratings. Equally important is that the proportion of blue-chip ratings given out relative to two- or three-star ratings is somewhat consistent with the grades assigned to high school and JUCO recruits. Elliott acknowledges that while he is monitoring transfers, he has yet to include them in his official Blue-Chip Ratio rankings. But, in the interest of curiosity, he did a separate ranking with transfers added, noting that for most teams, this lowered the Blue-Chip Ratio. Ohio State dropped to 86 percent, with Alabama dropping to 82 percent and Georgia dropping to 77 percent.
Since its inception in 2013, the Blue-Chip Ratio has been referenced on all the major broadcast networks and tracked closely by head coaches and administrators. It’s not the most complicated calculation in the world, but it’s a great way to figure out the top 10 percent or so of the teams in the sport which can take home the title.
Georgia’s current blue-chip ratio matches its ratio from 2021 when it went 14-1 and won its first national championship since 1980. In 2023, Georgia had the same Blue-Chip Ratio as it did during its 15-0 title run in 2022 (77 percent) and went 13-1, including a 12-0 run in the regular season for the third season in a row and taking down Florida State 63-3 in the Orange Bowl to break its own FBS record for margin of victory in a bowl game. At the end of the 2023 regular season, Georgia set a program and Southeastern Conference record with 29 consecutive wins, tying the Dawgs with Michigan (1901-1903), Miami (1990-1992), Florida State (2012-2014), and Clemson (2018-2019) for the ninth-longest win streak in FBS history.
All high school and JUCO scholarship signees count. Walk-ons are not signees, so they do not. Besides, they are rarely rated. Sticking with signees helps to standardize the process. If a player signs, is released from his National Letter of Intent, and signs with a new school, as opposed to transferring, 247Sports’ Bud Elliott — who created the blue-chip ratio — counts that player toward the new school.
If a player signs with a school and is unable to enroll and must go to JUCO, he still counts because the school used one of its Letters of Intent (LOI) on him.
Elliott uses the 247Sports Composite, which blends the major rankings and manually checks each signee in each class for accuracy. Some team sites years ago erroneously listed walk-ons as signees. Removing non-scholarship players and verifying signing lists is by far the most time-consuming element.
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