Jumbo Package: Gump Day!

Brother of former Alabama star leaving Tide program

One of Alabama’s backup offensive lineman is transferring.

Redshirt junior offensive guard Dallas Warmack, the younger brother of former Crimson Tide All-American Chance Warmack, is leaving the program and will be a graduate transfer, according to sources.

Oregon is a potential landing spot for Warmack, who is set to graduate this weekend, per sources.

We’ll start with the only real piece of news today. Dallas Warmack, a redshirt junior, is graduating this week and then is going transfer out. In his 4 years, he never broke into the starting lineup, though he was usually at the top of the list for the back-up groupings. With young, talented players like Jedrick Wills passing him up at guard, he decided he’d get his last shot at playing time somewhere else.

Dallas has, by all accounts, been a model of hard work the entire time he’s been at Alabama. We wish him the best wherever he goes, and I hope he wins a starting job and gets the chance to prove himself worthy of getting a look from the NFL.

College football top 25 rankings: Alabama on top post-spring, new coaches see rapid results

Spring has ended -- with a thud for some, a bang for others.

One look at my post-spring top 25 Power Rankings includes the usual suspects (seven SEC teams) and some surprises (Florida State? Texas?).

As of right now, Ohio State and the Big Ten look good to get back in the College Football Playoff. So do a couple of SEC teams with whom you might be familiar (Alabama, Georgia). That means the Pac-12 and Big 12 would be left out.

It’s early, but it isn’t coming out of the spring. We sort of know Jalen Hurts’ intentions. Jim Harbaugh has himself a quarterback, while Florida continues spending the decade trying to find one. And there may even be some NFL teams that have a hard time moving the ball on Clemson.

The time of year where writers have to start ranking things for content has begun. Yay offseason.

CBS here has Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, and Ohio State as #1-#4. Auburn is #10. Mississippi State is at #11, which seems high for a team that lost their best coach in program history.

Here’s a neat little video from the Atlanta Falcons

They put together some recordings of the initial phone calls when he was selected and of him touring the Falcons’ practice facilities. Calvin said that being drafted was the best day of his life— even better than when he committed to Alabama.

A couple million dollars guaranteed will do that.

Congrats to Calvin, and may you rack up many yards alongside Julio for the next decade!

Tide turning staggering number of 5-stars into first-round picks

There will be some that think, “Of course Alabama had the most players drafted. They get the best recruits.” That is true. But it’s also not a holistic look at what makes the Crimson Tide great under Nick Saban. Instead, one needs to examine Alabama’s NFL factory process; the rate at which the program transforms elite high school talent into NFL players. To do so, 247Sports looked at every five-star prospect of the Saban era and their eventual NFL Draft future. That means players from the 2008 recruiting class (Saban’s first full cycle at Alabama) to the 2015 recruiting classes (the most recent class with draft eligibility), excluding any athletes who remain in college.

There are 241 247Sports Composite five-star players from college football in that period – the elite of elite coming out of high school.

Alabama, unsurprisingly, signed the highest total of those at 29. But that’s not the important number. To truly grade development you must observe the number of those recruits who became first-round picks. That’s the full college cycle of development — a choice prospect comes in and a highly-regarded NFL talent comes out.

Fourteen of those 29 eventually became a first-round pick in Tuscaloosa, a rate of 48.3 percent that doesn’t count six other Crimson Tide five-stars that were second-round picks.

For some needed perspective on that number, let’s look at how the other FBS teams fared.

Take away Alabama’s 29 five-star players from that window, and there are 212 five-star recruits. Some schools have had a lot (Florida State: 24) in that 2008-15 period, while others have had just one (13 different schools). Taken together, the number of first-round picks from that five-star pool minus Alabama is 36.

That’s a hit rate of only 17 percent.

Think about that. Alabama’s five-star recruits are picked in the first round at a rate of 48.3 percent, while five-star recruits that go to any other school are selected at a 17-percent clip. A five-star prospect who picks Alabama is more than doubly likely be selected in the first round than if he goes anywhere else.

This a really fun little piece from 247. “A five star prospect who picks Alabama is more than doubly likely to be selected in the first round than if he goes anywhere else”

It’s not just the recruiting that has made Nick Saban and Alabama the best college football dynasty ever, it’s the fact that he can train his players to live up to their potential and be ready for the pros.

Here are the percentages of five-star recruits that became first-round picks from other programs that signed 10-plus such players from 2008-15: Florida (29.4%), LSU (21.4%), Georgia (18.8%), Florida State (16.7%), USC (15.8) and Ohio State (0%).

Hahahaha Ohio State. Go Buckeyes, amiright?

As a personal aside, while linking this article, I remembered that one of my very first pieces for Roll Bama Roll 4 and a half years ago was one where I got all the percentages of the different positions and recruiting rankings to where they got drafted. Or something like that. I don’t totally remember what I did, but it was a massive spreadsheet. And just imagine how different those numbers would be after 4 more years of great draft classes.

That’s it for today. Happy Gump Day!