Stanford has done an incredible job turning from one of the worst teams in FBS football to a national power. The program's rise was fast and impressive, and happened largely due to a staunch defense. The defenses that turned the program around were littered with less than blue chip recruits, a starkly different group of kids than found in the usual top powers. Let's look at how impressive all this is!

What do we know about recruiting?

To understand Stanford's success with lower ranked prospects, we have to first look at what we know about recruiting. Recruiting matters. Rivals, Scout, 247 Sports, ESPN, and all of the prospecting services do a good enough job prospecting players for us to know the rankings that come out on National Signing Day matter. Perennial championship winner Alabama has ranked first in terms of recruiting for a staggering 6 straight years. They've also produced more NFL draft picks than any other program, and there is a clear correlation between top recruiting teams and next level success.

The correlation between top recruiting teams and top succeeding teams is apparent. Further, there's a greater relationship on the defensive side of the ball between recruiting success and on-field success. In particular, defensive linemen are easier to scout than linebackers, who are easier than defensive backs. All three phases of the defense grade out with a higher correlation than any offensive position.

All this is to say Stanford's defensive success is even more impressive when you consider the defenses of Stanford's recent run were founded on 3-star recruits. This is to take nothing away from being a three-star recruit: these players are still incredible athletes making big time plays all over the country. I myself was a 0-star recruit. But considering the correlation between stars and success on the defensive end and just how well the top defensive teams have recruited, it's clear Stanford does a top notch job finding underrated talent, developing them physically and mentally into top notch football players, and paving the way for these players to succeed beyond the college level.

Stanford's on field success

To get a good picture of how good Stanford's defense has been over the years, let's look at the team's FEI rankings. You can read more in that link, but the short of it is FEI looks at teams efficiency ratings. Raw numbers can be misleading as teams playing high volume spread teams are likely to give up more yards than a pound the ball team, all yards aren't created equal, etc.. FEI helps to neutralize opponent while looking at stats. That said, I did include the team's yards/game and points/game averages, just for kicks.

You knew this already, but Stanford has had some killer defenses that compare to the bigger conference names.

Stanford's recruiting success

As the lede suggests, we're going to dive into Stanford's success with the non-top tier players. That said, Stanford has succeeded in recruiting at a nearly top level for a few years now, ranking in the second highest recruiting 'conference' per Matt Hinton. That's not quite with the likes of Alabama, OSU, Notre Dame, etc. but pretty darn close. In spite of the most difficult academic barriers of any large college program, Stanford has nearly been the best at recruiting in recent years.

Let's take a quick look at the breakdown of athletes Stanford's had by class:

Stanford has dominated the three star recruiting scene and as they've improved on the field and in recruiting, four and five star players have trickled through. Of course, this doesn't give us any idea of where the on-field success has come from. Let's see where Stanford gets the majority of their tackles.

and compare that against say, 2015 Alabama:

There are a few caveats with this list, as individual stats in football can be a little misleading. First, sometimes tackles aren't a good thing. A corner with a high number of tackles is being targeted at a higher rate with higher offensive success. Tackles don't happen at a rate proportionate with defensive value. Defensive lineman are often more important in a play than their tackle numbers suggest: a nosetackle breaking the point of attack and forcing a back to go outside won't show up on the statcard, but it's a major win. Teams that force incompletions might not have a ton of tackles. Yadda Yadda Yadda.

All that said, I do think this list gives us an excellent idea of how much Stanford is playing certain guys. Some of it is self-fulfilling: of course three-star guys are making the tackles if their roster is built on three-star guys. But it goes to show that even when the defense was elite, it was built on the likes of Trent Murphy, Josh Mauro, Ben Garnder, etc. Guys Stanford is still succeeding at bringing in. Sure, there were four-star guys like Shayne Skov or James Vaughters to help, but Stanford's defensive core was three star-guys. And as FEI suggests, these defenses are the real deal.

The 2010/2011 defenses are particularly impressive. These years represent a huge jump for the unit and the program, turning the team from OK to a real national threat. The success of these years has helped improve recruiting thereby the future of the team, and those successes were almost exclusively due to two and three-star guys.

Success at the next level

A final piece to indicate just how successful Stanford has been at finding hidden talent is looking at success at the next level. The FEI ratings give us a good indication that Stanford's success isn't an easy schedule mirage, but another way we can verify the Cardinal's defensive studs are in fact studs is their success at reaching the next level.

The list above indicates players who made appearances in the NFL. Players who were invited to a training camp didn't quite make the cut, but I've included all guys who have made regular season appearances on a roster.

In particular, it's amazing to look at Stanford's success on the defensive front with the two and three-star recruits. In 2013, the line consisted of walk-on David Parry, 3-star Josh Mauro, and 3-star Henry Anderson. Helping the line on the outside was 3-star Trent Murphy, 4-star James Vaughters, and 3-star A.J. Tarpley. All of those guys are currently in the NFL (Vaughters on a practice squad) and Parry, Mauro, Anderson, Murphy, and Tarpley all logged major minutes in 2015.

This is of course, very unscientific. But the fact the players on these dominant defenses are seeing success at the next level helps verify that the dominant units of the Harbaugh/Shaw eras have indeed been dominant.

What does all this mean?

To be clear, this is far from an exact science so it's wise to not take too much meaning from this. That said, I have two final thoughts.

Stanford can compete with the big boys

That doesn't seem like much of a proclamation for a team that finished third in the rankings in 2015 and has been in a BCS Bowl 5 out of the last 6 seasons. But this is still a sport where the best teams play an exhibition match a quarter of their regular season games, a sport where we finally have a playoff after a hundred years without and it only includes 3% of total teams. Almost half of all playoff games (and thereby teams) have been utter disasters. Long story short, it's really hard to objectively know which teams are best in a sport with so many teams and so few chances to actually find out. We still see time and time again where teams we think are good get absolutely blown out when really tested.

But Stanford's success seems real which is partially verified by the team's success at the next level. Stanford is clearly getting legit top players, and that bodes well for whenever Stanford faces a new challenge (read: plays a team from the SEC).

Be even more excited about the tremendous recruiting class of 2016

Stanford has done a tremendous job finding next level talent out of lower ranked recruits. When you look at Stanford's incredible class of 2016, get just as excited about the three star guys as you do about the four and five. The Cardinal have proven time and time again to find dominant defenders without the blue chip tag.

*Note: This post is particularly relevant with Coach Randy Hart's retirement. He did a spectacular job as a coach and is undoubtedly a key to Stanford succeeding defensively without the top name guys.