Texas A&M Football’s 2022 Recruiting Class Compared To The Entire ACC And Big Ten Is Insane

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  • For Texas A&M to land the highest-ranked recruiting class of all-time is impressive, but to say that NIL was not a factor at all is ludicrous.
  • The Aggies’ class is even more insane when you compare its signees to the entire ACC and Big Ten.
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Texas A&M football went 8-4 last season and somehow landed the nation’s top recruiting class in 2022. In fact, when National Signing Day closed in February, it was the highest-ranked recruiting class of all-time and it only got better last week.

Lebbeus Overton, a five-star defensive tackle who took a wild ‘Friday The 13th’-esque video in College Station, committed to play for the Aggies last week. He was originally part of the Class of 2023, reclassified and signed with Texas A&M.

Overton was the eighth five-star recruit to commit as part of the class and made the best class in history even better. The Aggies also have 19 four-stars and three three-stars on board.

While the Texas A&M’s 2022 recruiting class is truly insane in terms of numbers on paper, it gets even crazier when you put the class in perspective to other conferences.

Texas A&M signed eight five-star recruits, which is two less than the entire rest of the Southeastern Conference, five more than Alabama, three more than Georgia and seven more than LSU and Missouri.

Meanwhile, Ohio State signed two five-stars, Penn State signed three and Michigan signed one— totaling six for the entire Big Ten Conference. In the ACC, Clemson signed two and North Carolina signed two— which is half as many as Texas A&M for the entire conference.

And yet, Jimbo Fisher has the audacity to try and claim that NIL money had nothing to do with A&M’s recruiting efforts.

. . . Yeah, okay . . .

To say that every single one of the 30 (!!) top-ranked recruits want to play in *checks notes* College Station without even so much as thinking about the dollar is ignorant and ludicrous. ESPECIALLY when people with knowledge of the recruiting atmosphere in the Texas/Oklahoma region are putting an unfathomable price tag on what the class may have cost.

The cost of crude oil is at the most expensive price per barrel that it has been in five years. Texas A&M (and all other state schools) receives a lot of money every year from the state’s Permanent University Fund. The fund is directly financed by oil money.

Obviously, the school and the football team are not using that money on recruiting. That would be a direct violation of the NCAA’s rules against Pay-For-Play.

However, it is easy to assume that many of the school’s alumni are involved with the oil field. It is an agricultural school in Texas.

Would it not make sense that some of that oil money could then be siphoned back into NIL collectives? Would those funds not be enticing to a recruit who is deciding between another school and Texas A&M? Do you think that Michigan graduates have a massive oil-based influx of cash right now?

There is no way of knowing exactly what the money looks like behind-the-scenes with boosters and collectives. But it certainly makes you think.