National Signing Day 2016 conference power rankings

Ranking every college football conference’s 2016 recruiting class after National Signing Day

The busiest day of the college football offseason has now come in gone as National Signing Day is now over. There were players who did their best to show off some theatrics in making their announcements, players who showed their humility in just putting on a hat and appearing grateful for the opportunity, and of course the fair share of miscues from various players and programs around the country.

Now that the dust has settled, though, and the majority of the 2016 recruiting classes have been completed, we can start to fully assess what teams around the college football world were able to do on National Signing Day and in the recruiting process as a whole.

There’s no question that the usual suspects were present in a big way as the likes of the Alabama Crimson Tide landed numerous big-time prospects and as Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines landed the top dog of the 2016 class of recruits in defensive lineman Rashan Gary.

With everything being almost fully settled in terms of signings now, not only can we assess what individual teams were able to do, but also assess which conferences were able to get the job done as a whole and improve for the future with strong classes of incoming freshmen.

Before we start stacking the conferences up against one another, though, it should be said that I left the independents out of the rankings since there are only three schools not aligned with a conference. However, the strong showing of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and a solid class for the BYU Cougars made it a nice National Signing Day for the independents.

Now that we have that out of the way, these are how the conferences stack up against one another and where they rank in terms of their combined 2016 recruiting classes.

Next: No. 10 Sun Belt