This is obviously going to be a long and kind of painful post. So let me start off with a positive note. We sure looked good against St. Johns last night, didn’t we?

OK, let’s start off with Rivals.com, which seems to be everyone’s favorite recruiting analysis organization. And why not? Because Rivals is composed of analysts representing practically every major university (including Pitt), it tends to cancel out its own biases. Furthermore, it is the only network that I’ve seen which ranks the recruiting classes all the way up to #124. This is important for fans of schools like Pitt, which will obviously be out of the top 25 this year (@#%*@#! Morelli & Johnson). So here’s Rivals.com’s final ranking of the 2004 football recruiting classes.

1 Southern California
2 LSU
3 Florida State
4 Miami-FL
5 Michigan
6 Georgia
7 Florida
8 Oklahoma
9 Ohio State
10 Texas
11 Tennessee
12 Oregon
13 Texas A&M
14 Penn State
15 Alabama
16 Michigan State
17 Maryland
18 Kansas State
19 Washington
20 Purdue
21 Auburn
22 Arkansas
23 California
24 Boston College
25 Washington State…

32 Notre Dame
40 Virginia
41 Virginia Tech
43 South Florida
47 West Virginia
48 PITTSBURGH
52 Rutgers
54 Syracuse
64 Louisville
80 Cincinnati
124 Georgetown (I knew that somebody would want to know who came in dead last)

(I highlighted Miami, Penn State, and Ohio State because (1) I wanted to show how much Johnson’s commitment would help the Hurricanes (four spaces since Tuesday), (2) I wanted to show how much Morelli’s commitment would help the Nittany Lions (two spaces since Tuesday), and (3) if this crap keeps up, Ohio State will be my only alma mater that can @#%*@#! play big time football. How depressing is that, given Pitt’s prestige at certain points this past fall [when we were admittedly overrated]?)

So how bad does that suck? In December, our football recruiting class was competing with Penn State’s. Now we’ve fallen behind both the Hoopies and (gulp!) the South Florida Bulls.

For those of you who are only interested in Pitt football recruiting, you can pretty much skip the rest of this post. Like I said above, none of the other recruiting services go beyond the top 25.

On SportsCenter last night, ESPN’s Tom Lemming gave his top ten recruiting classes as follows: 1. USC, 2. LSU, 3. Michigan, 4. Ohio State, 5. Miami, 6. Oklahoma, 7. Florida State, 8. Texas A&M, 9. Texas, and 10. Tennessee.

TheInsiders.com‘s top 25 football recruiting classes (via Fox Sports) goes like this: 1. USC, 2. LSU, 3. Miami, 4. FSU, 5. Michigan, 6. Georgia, 7. Oklahoma, 8. Florida, 9. Tennessee, 10. Texas, 11. Ohio State, 12. Penn State, 13. Michigan State, 14. Texas A&M, 15. Oregon, 16. Maryland, 17. Texas Tech, 18. UNC, 19. Alabama, 20. N.C. State, 21. Washington State, 22. Washington, 23. Arizona State, 24. UCLA, and 25. Virginia. Since TheInsiders.com never listed Pitt’s recruiting class in its top 25 at any point this year (even when we actually deserved it), I could care less about this outfit.

Finally, we have the Official College Sports Network‘s top 25 football recruiting classes by ESPN’s Bill Hodge. Hodge’s ranking is always the first to come out, and was by far the kindest to Pitt throughout most of this season. Before Christmas, Pitt was ranked as high as #14. But we fell to #18 by January 4, #22 by January 16, and #25 by January 28. Now, of course, we’re unranked.

No. 1 Southern California
No. 2 LSU
No. 3 Florida State
No. 4 Miami-Florida
No. 5 Michigan
No. 6 Oklahoma
No. 7 Georgia
No. 8 Florida
No. 9 Ohio State
No. 10 Texas
Tie No. 10 Tennessee
No. 12 Texas A&M
No. 13 Oregon
No. 14 Penn State
No. 15 Michigan State
No. 16 Alabama
No. 17 Maryland
No. 18 Washington
No. 19 California
No. 20 Purdue
No. 21 Missouri
No. 22 Washington State
No. 23 Kansas State
No. 24 Nebraska
No. 25 Notre Dame

OK, enough of the minutia and the kicking ourselves. I’m through with recruiting class rankings for this year. I’m gonna grab a cup of coffee, brace myself, grab today’s copy of the Altoona Mirror, and see what that idiot Neil Rudel has to say about Pitt’s latest humiliation at the hands of the mighty Nittany Lions.

God, I hate Penn State.