Grading UCF Football's 2013 Recruiting Class Five Years Later

National Signing Day is in the books, and college football teams the nation over again welcome a group of recruits to the delight of fans everywhere.

I do not subscribe to this point of view.

Recruiting is a crapshoot. Every year, hundreds of sure-fire program-altering stars end up on the scrap heap of college football, and every year thousands of also-rans develop into NFL-level talent. UCF's crops of players are no different year to year.

So instead of evaluating UCF's 2018 recruiting class before they even set foot on campus, we do things a bit different here. We evaluate the recruiting class from five years ago to see how everything panned out.

It's simple: Five years gives us the ability to evaluate every player who came through, including those who redshirted. Some finished in four, others took all five, and some never even set foot on campus. This gives us the benefit of hindsight and shows how well UCF does in the player development realm.

Here's our post-career evaluation star system:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ – Star player and bonafide NFL Draft talent. Need not have stayed all four years.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ – All-conference-level or solid starter, possible late-round NFL draftee or UFA pickup.

⭐⭐⭐ – Played and finished career at UCF, graduated (or at least should have). Not NFL talent.

⭐⭐ – Played but didn’t finish at UCF. Transferred, left football, or something like that.

⭐ – Never played, probably on a milk carton somewhere.

So here's how UCF's 2013 recruiting class panned out (Asterisk denotes mid-year enrollee. Bold denotes a five-year player):

Some thoughts:

• This may have been one of UCF's best recruiting classes ever.
• 11 of the 20 players finished at UCF. Depending on what you think, it could have been 13 (Stanback and DiNovo).
• Remember that the Griffin Brothers were a package deal. It worked out.
• Eight of the 20 players in the class out-performed their Rivals star ranking.
• Will Stanback was in this class. Just imagine.
• Justin Holman could probably be considered a 3.5-star player, given that he quarterbacked UCF to a share of the 2014 AAC title, but was hurt for most of 2015 and sacrificed for the team in 2016.

So that's a look at UCF's 2013 recruiting class. Some of these guys were lucky - They were a part of three conference titles and two BCS/NY6 bowl wins, and the two best seasons in UCF history (along with one of the worst).

It may be a while before we see another group have as much success.

P.S.: In 2017 I didn't get around to it. So I'm making that up to you. Here's a review of the 2012 UCF Football recruiting class for your enjoyment: