Meet Alabama’s fifth consecutive top-ranked recruiting class

While Alabama wasn’t the unanimous recruiting national champion this season — Rivals named USC as its top class — the Crimson Tide did just fine.

With 24 total signees, Alabama head coach Nick Saban’s composite recruiting national champion crop this season is one of his smallest totals at Alabama, but where it may lack quantity, it makes up for it in quality.

Alabama signed six 5-star recruits on Wednesday’s National Signing Day, tying Saban’s record for five-stars from the past three years and continuing to be the only school to nab six of the highest ranked players in a single class. The class has five players in the top five of their respective positions and also adds 14 four-star players for good measure.

The team loaded up on running backs and defensive backs, recruiting at least two five stars at each position. This class also has the top-rated quarterback in the country in Blake Barnett, and a top-10 defensive tackle with Daron Payne.

“It is one of the best classes I have seen in 20 years,” CBS Sports recruiting analyst Tom Lemming said. “Everyone is a big-name recruit. There are no sleepers. Every player in the class looks like a difference-maker.

“They really helped themselves in the secondary and got one of the nation’s premiere running backs and quarterbacks. I’ve been doing this for 36 years and no one has ever had the top-ranked class for five-straight years.”

Even with all this success, National Signing Day was mostly unsurprising, as it usually is for Alabama. The majority of the recruits were either early enrollees or solid verbal commits, so that only left a handful of players who had yet to make up their mind about school. Four-star wide receiver Daylon Charlot was the only undecided player to select Alabama on signing day, with receiver K.J. Hill and defensive end CeCe Jefferson heading elsewhere.

But, as Saban and every other coach in America will say in their press conference today, the team is happy with the players they were able to get and they productively addressed their needs. Of course the true value of a recruiting class isn’t known until three years have gone by and these players realize their true potential, but the numbers game has Alabama on top again this year.

Here is Alabama’s 2015 full recruiting class from top to bottom with a chart via 247Sports.