Paul Myerberg

USA TODAY Sports

Games are won with Jimmies and Joes and not Xs and Os, former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer said, an adage that can be condensed into even simpler terms: Talent wins championships.

National signing day is in our collective rearview mirrors, with the start of the 2017 college football season still seven long months away. The interim will be filled with clichés — teams will get stronger in the weight room and will play a more physical brand of football, to name two.

But there is a direct line from signing day to September. In fact, projecting how the 2017 season will unfurl is as simple as connecting the dots.

Looking back at how each team from the Power Five conferences has recruited during the past five cycles — a period that would encompass every class from the incoming freshmen signed on Wednesday through fifth-year seniors — might be the strongest predictor for the coming season.

It’s a simple formula: Using the composite standings compiled by 247Sports.com, I’ll provide the average final class ranking for each Power Five team during the past five years. If sorted by conference or division, these numbers should at least give an early suggestion for what to expect once college football finally returns in August.

A clear top two in Florida State and Clemson; a talented yet somewhat underachieving program in Miami; depth in the Coastal Division. Sounds about right. Then again, the fact that Georgia Tech is ranked last in the division may very well be an outlier.

And here are the first two noticeable flaws in this project. One is Kansas State’s Bill Snyder, who has proven over the course of decades that where his class lands on the signing-day rankings is a poor barometer for how his team will look in the fall. The second is Texas and Baylor, which may rank in the top three in this five-year recruiting glance but will struggle to match that in the season standings in 2017.

This helps to represent two factors. The first is that Ohio State has taken a distinct overall advantage against the rest of the Big Ten in terms of overall talent level — a gap widened over all but a handful of conference foes during this week’s signing day. The second is how the East Division has been the far stronger of the two divisions on signing day, a fact reflected during the past several regular seasons.

Well, this one’s a mess. Oregon isn’t winning the North Division in 2017; it will be one of Washington or Stanford, programs that tend to allow others to win in February while cleaning up in the fall. While USC is the likely favorite in the South, the recruiting standings overlook the tremendous work Utah does developing talent and the class Colorado signed on the heels of its Alamo Bowl berth.

Five years, five No. 1 signing classes. Such is life at Alabama. And this table paints a frustrating picture for the rest of the SEC. To the East Division, it stands to reason that Georgia’s top-tier recruiting efforts — including the nation’s No. 3 class on Wednesday — should pay off for Kirby Smart and the Bulldogs.