I know this topic has been debated to death, so forgive me, but I went through the trouble of compiling some data and I thought I'd go ahead and post it...

There have been a number of assertions that freshman, even highly ranked freshman, are not very likely to make an impact (guilty). And there have been a number of counters that freshman do make an impact, and the key determinant is opportunity for playing time. There was a recent analysis posted that showed players ranked from 10-30 had a pretty decent chance of not making much of an impact. But this seemed counter intuitive to me, given the string of impact freshman that the Terps have had over the last several years, despite Gary being considered by most to be the worst recruiter in the history of national-championship-winning-hall-of-fame coaches (just sayin'...).

So, I thought a better way to explore the topic might be to start with the freshman who have made an impact, and see who they are and how highly they were ranked. I compiled a list of the Freshman All-Conference Teams from all Big 6 conferences for 2011-12, and then looked up their rankings on Scout. There were actually 35 players, rather than 30, because some conferences award more than 5 players. The list is below the jump for your reference, but here are some observations:

Top 30 ranking seems to be a threshold. 19 of the top 30 made the all conference list, so if a player is ranked that highly, it's a good bet that he'll make an immediate impact. I guess that's a bit obvious.

The interesting thing is that after the top 30, it appears to be a crap shoot. 5 of the players who made their all conference teams were ranked between 46 and 94. And a full 11 out of 35 players (31%) were not ranked in scout's top 100. And at least 3 players were only considered 2 star prospects!

So, thinking about our incoming freshman class, since none of the players are top 30, it seems to me that any one of them could end up having the greatest impact - including Dodd! - at least statistically speaking. I'm sure observation would lead one to think otherwise, but then I guess the same would have been said about Anthony Collins, Dave Sobolewski and David Kravish. I mean, who the hell are those guys anyway?

Just some food for thought.