I was looking at the 247Sports MAC recruiting page:
https://247sports.com/Season/2019-Football/CompositeTeamR...

I notice that so far, 39 of the 57 recruits they have picked up are 3-star recruits. That seems high, so I thought I'd look at prior years:
2019 39/57 .687
2018 114/224 .509
2017 102/286 .357
2016 80/246 .325
2015 98/291 .337
2014 63/263 .240
2013 63/250 .252
2012 66/286 .231
2011 25/252 .100

Either the entire MAC is recruiting a lot better these days, or grades have been inflated. Maybe the ESPN deal is attracting better and better players, or maybe in a post-Fleck world the MAC set it's sights higher, or, maybe there is nothing here but inflation.

Something smells funny there. I’m 90% grade inflation on this one. The ESPN deal accounts for maybe the other 10% at most. Frank keeps talking about how that helps us, but we never do well on
MAC rankings, but get plenty of All MAC players anyway.

This years number will undoubtedly drop as the classes fill up and the lower end of the recruiting teams-including us - get their players. Miami is blowing up right now, recruiting wise and Toledo is doing their usual thing.

One other factor I track that is not nearly as prone to inflation is the other offers that players have. On a year by year basis, here are the average number of other schools that players who signed with Ohio had to choose from:
2006 .65
2007 .76
2008 1.40 <=== outstanding class
2009 1.02
2010 .87 <=== horrible class
2011 2.62 <=== weak class
2012 2.64
2013 2.17
2014 2.28
2015 2.31
2016 3.00 <=== weak class
2017 6.00 <=== I believe this will be an outstanding class
2018 2.79
2019 (so far) 4.63

You can see some correlation between these numbers and how the classes turned out, but not a complete correlation. 2008 and 2017 were both outstanding, and were higher than the years before and after. 2010 was awful, and this predicts that. Yet, 2011 and 2016 looked good on paper, but had a number of players who didn't contribute, so you never really know.

Even these numbers may be subject to inflation, if schools are issuing far more offers than they used to, which they may be. It's certainly possible that some schools send out 200 offers, knowing they can only grant 25, and then cancelling them once they have acceptances from other people. Thus, say you want 2 tight ends, a school could make offers to 16 tight ends, and after 2 accept, cancel the rest.

There is nothing wrong with that, by the way, and Ohio does it, too. For example, I remember back in 2006, there was a WR Ohio offered over the summer. He sat on the offer until January, and then tried to accept it, but by then Ohio had filled the position, when Taylor Price accepted. If he had accepted in September, he'd have been a Bobcat, but he waited until it was too late. Instead he ended up at Akron, where he made one career catch, while Ohio ended up with Taylor Price.

Seems like all of OUr recruits this year are 3 stars.

Will they drop down to 2 when the media finds out who they verbaled to?

In twelve years, the only player where I have seen the rating reduced after they verbaled to Ohio was Maxwell Howell, who started at 4 stars, and ended up at 2. Considering that he never played in his time at Ohio, and transferred to Portland State (he played in 10 games for them last year, with 17 tackles and an interception), it's hard to argue that he was unfairly downrated.

In any case, not all are 3-star, at least not yet. Vannest is only rated two stars by 247Sports (the only rating service that still rates G5 players - ESPN and Rivals don't, and Scout is part of 247Sports now), and Atkinson, Rourke, and Gates have not yet been rated. They all play like 3-stars (or better), and that is what counts anyway.

Amen....their vids look awesome...especially Blauser’s.

While not related directly to your question, it does go to the value of the grading system. 247 sports had the bobcat 2013 class as 117 nationally and 10th in the mac. meanwhile, the 2013 class contained: Poling, Chad Moore, Basham, Dorian Brown, Sayles, Trent Smart, Mangen, Porter, Durrell Wood, Aloese, Cope, Mason Morgan. Looks like we might have made inside the top 10 mac for that year given that at least 5 of these guys made an nfl mini-cam and most or all made an all-mac team.

I thought of a direct way to determine if there is inflation. Here is the same table as above, with the addition of the average national rank for MAC teams:

2019 39/57 .687
2018 114/224 .509 106.7
2017 102/286 .357 101.7
2016 80/246 .325 109
2015 98/291 .337 98.1
2014 63/263 .240 105.9
2013 63/250 .252 106.3
2012 66/286 .231 98.9
2011 25/252 .100 98.6

Even though the MAC has dramatically increased the number of 3 star players, it's rank has fallen slightly. The MAC had a higher average rank in 2011 when only 10% of the class was 3-star players than it did in 2018 when 50% of the players were 3-star.

The answer is that yes, there is grade inflation.

Question: are there also significantly more 5 stars and 4 stars or is there just more reliable information on the non-elite recruits?

Or, possibly the non-three star players recruited previously were actually better in terms of talent and coachability than today's non-three star players, so that it's less a matter of grade-inflation on the three-star level and more that there was a previous under-estimation of two-star and lower players. So, in this scenario, you'd expect a fair number of the previous two-star (and lower) players to in actuality have been four-star or above. This should probably be reflected in NFL draft and UFA status. Just an alternative hypothesis.

Edit: This way of looking at the data would be in line with some previous statements that some players were downgraded in their "star status" when recruited by a G5 team. This would indicate that some star rankings were given to players not on the basis of actual detailed analysis but on who was recruiting them successfully. This would account for the MAC being stronger as a conference when they had less 3-star recruits because the conference rankings are based on actual performance and not on projections based on the quality of recruits.

Maxwell Howell starting for P State good luck Max!