When it comes to recruiting, Nick Saban has everybody playing for second place.

See that stubborn red line below that refuses to squiggle like all the other squiggly lines? That’s Alabama.

In each of the last six recruiting cycles, Alabama has signed the top-ranked class, according to the 247Sports Composite team rankings. This chart visualizes the class ranking for every team that has signed a Top 5 recruiting class in any of the last six years — 13 teams in all. None among the baker’s dozen has fallen out of the Top 15 in any of these five years. But nobody has been able to keep the Crimson Tide from the top, either.

The above chart shows the 15 teams who have averaged at least 250 Composite recruiting points over the last six years. And in studying it, we see just how much separation Alabama has created between itself and the rest of the competition.

Saban has led the Crimson Tide to averaging 311.93 Composite recruiting points each year for the last six years — 22.34 more than the next best team (Ohio State) and the only team to average at least 300 points during that span. The average FBS team had 165.1 recruiting points per year over the last six years — less than half what Alabama averaged in that same stretch.

This is another chart visualizing those same 15 teams’ recruiting performance over the same six years. Here we see how they recruited relative to an average FBS team during that span, measured by standard deviations from the mean using the same Composite recruiting points metric from the previous two charts.

These are the only 15 teams at least 1.5 standard deviations above the mean, with Alabama being one of four to accumulate enough recruiting points to be at least two standard deviations above the mean. Alabama’s lead this time is nearly four-tenths of a standard deviation.

For reference, in a normal distribution, one would expect about 0.5% of observations — or 1 in every 200 — to be as far above the mean as Alabama is here, 2.58 standard deviations above the mean.

Long story short: Year in and year out, Nick Saban has dominated the recruiting trail at a rate that nobody can keep up with.

Christian Corona is a contributing writer to 247Sports focusing on analytics-oriented college sports content. He is a data analytics consultant based in New York. You can reach him at @ChristianC0rona on Twitter.