This is the most talented Ohio State team of all time

Last season, according to 247 Sports’ College Football Team Talent Composite, the Ohio State Buckeyes had the second-most talented team in the country, and their most talented team yet.

The Team Talent Composite looks at every team’s entire roster of players to come up with an average rating. Ohio State’s was 92.13 last season (they also have a points total, but that calculation is a little more opaque), second behind Alabama.

But this season’s Team Talent Composite isn’t out yet, and likely won’t be until right before the season starts, so I went ahead and totaled up the 2018 team’s average rating:

As you can see, Ohio State has gotten progressively more talented since 247 started tracking full roster talent in 2015. That team was arguably Ohio State’s best ever to not win a national championship, with nearly everyone back from the 2014 team. But the Buckeyes have significantly increased their total talent, from a narrow four-star average to a solid four-star average in 2018.

For reference, the player with the closest rating to this year’s average is freshman linebacker Dallas Gant. For 2017, it’s tight end Luke Farrell, and in 2016 and 2015 it’s between Terry McLaurin and Jerron Cage.

This box-and-whisker plot shows the distribution of team talent, with the whiskers defining the upper and lower ranges of talent rating (.997, Nick Bosa, down to .83, Sean Nuernberger), the upper and lower quartiles defining the middle 50 percent of talent, the box line showing the median talent level, the x defining the mean team talent, and the single dot at the bottom showing an outlier — long-snapper Liam McCullough (.783 rating).

Because .898, the lower quartile rating, is considered a four-star prospect, at least 75 percent of the team was ranked as a blue chip prospect. Which is good.

As far as I can tell, this is likely to be the second- or third-most talented team since 2015. Alabama’s 2017 team had an average rating of 93.33. Alabama’s 2018 team may still edge out the 2018 Buckeyes in team talent, despite the Tide finishing sixth in the recruiting rankings for the 2018 class (with a 91.82 average).

When the full country team talent ratings are updated in late summer we can compare talent with other teams, but it should be apparent that this is an insanely talented football team... but with a really difficult schedule, which we’ll get into later this summer.