"Recruiting" is a term that gets thrown around a lot in college football. It's come to be a catch-all that refers to talent acquisition and roster building but usually it is distilled down to one metric: recruiting rankings.

That doesn't tell the whole story though and Butch Jones at Tennessee is a perfect example. From the moment he was hired as the head coach in Knoxville, Jones has been hailed as a great "recruiter."

On the surface, the praise is well-earned. Jones elevated Tennessee's recruiting rankings to a level we'd expect from an SEC title contender. So he is a good recruiter in the literal sense that Jones has been able to construct classes with prospects that a lot of other schools wanted.

But successful recruiting in practice only matters if you've got two other qualities. It's also about being strong evaluators and maybe most importantly, being strong developers of talent once it arrives.

It's in either one or both of these other areas that Jones and his staff have been severely lacking. The best illustration of this is Tennessee's hit rate with elite recruits.

The five-star, Top100 caliber recruits are the guys that transform and elevate football programs. At 247Sports, our team rankings formula reflects that theory, that a Leonard Fournette, a Joey Bosa, an Ed Oliver or a Jacob Eason are invaluable to the foundation of a roster. Those highly-rated guys are also often much more likely to succeed because so many schools have evaluated them and signed off on them, so many recruiting analysts have seen them and verified what they can do in so many settings and they're often college-ready to make immediate impacts on campus. With them, you're getting three to four years of production rather than just one or two.

To make an NFL comparison, these are the first- and second-rounders. These are the franchise players that championship rosters need to contend.

Since Butch Jones took over at Tennessee in December of 2012, he's gotten his fair share of those Top100-caliber recruits. In the classes of 2013, 2014 and 2015, Jones has brought in 10 players out of the high school ranks that fell into the Top100 according to the recruiting industry generated 247Sports Composite.

Those players were:

DT, Kahlil McKenzie (No. 6, class of 2015)

WR, Josh Malone (No. 36, class of 2014)

DE, Kyle Phillips (No. 36, class of 2015)

RB, Jalen Hurd (No. 40, class of 2014)

WR, Preston Williams (No. 48, class of 2015)

DT, Shy Tuttle (No. 53, class of 2015)

OT, Drew Richmond (No. 54, class of 2015)

S, Todd Kelly Jr. (No. 61, class of 2014)

WR, Marquez North (No. 90, class of 2013)

LB, Dillon Bates (No. 95, class of 2014)

Since arriving on campus, that group has been a collective bust. If we say that a Top100 player should correlate in talent to a NFL draft pick in the first three rounds (which is the way 247Sports projects our rankings), then Tennessee has hit on three of 10 if we're being generous.

Two of those hits would be Shy Tuttle and Jalen Hurd. While Tuttle has been very good when he's on the field, injury issues have rendered him ineffective this fall. Meanwhile Hurd has voluntarily left the team just a few yards shy of Tennessee's all-time rushing record. NFL sources have indicated to me that despite his red flags, he's still very much in the picture as a high draft pick.

After a slow start to his career, Josh Malone is having a breakout junior season at wide receiver and still has time to "make it," so we included him in the three-out-of-10 tally. McKenzie, Richmond and Phillips still have time to develop, too, even if it looks unlikely that they fulfill their lofty expectations. Preston Williams flashed early in his career but if he matches his ranking it will be at Colorado State, where he's transferred.

So that puts Tennessee in a best-case scenario of a 30 percent hit rate on franchise players. Of course maybe it's not Tennessee's fault that its players are overrated. But when you compare similarly ranked players at some of Tennessee's rivals, there's a huge discrepancy in that hit rate.

Alabama is the golden standard of both recruiting and developing. In the classes of 2013, 2014 and 2015, Nick Saban has landed 35 Top100 prospects. Among them, a very conservative count puts Alabama at 21 hits out of those 35, or 60 percent. That doesn't even count some players like Christian Miller and Hootie Jones, guys that are in position to develop into hits when their number is called.

What about East rival Florida? Over that same three year span, the Gators have signed 12 Top100 prospects. It looks like seven are hits. That list includes Jalen Tabor, Vernon Hargreaves and CeCe Jefferson while I'm not giving them credit yet for guys like Martez Ivey or Miami transfer Gerald Willis.

Compare Jones' results to the other coaches that were hired during the same cycle as him and the results don't look any better. Five of Gus Malzhan's eight Top100 players during those three years are likely to live up to the expectations at Auburn. Bret Bielema only landed four in his first three years at Arkansas but if you include RB Alex Collins (a fifth round pick), you can probably call 3 of those 4 hits.

The Top100 prospects don't tell the full story with Butch Jones. Derek Barnett is a likely first-round pick and was ranked just outside the Top100. Cam Sutton was a three-star that is sure to get drafted. If Jalen Reeves-Maybin stays healthy he'll be a pro for years.

But all of those other programs listed above have their own overachievers, too. To compete for national titles, those overachievers have to join the franchise players.

Butch Jones isn't alone. UCLA has a similar hit rate to the Volunteers under Jim Mora Jr. with roughly three of 10 Top100 guys panning out during that three year span. Notre Dame is in the 30 percent range as well with its 11 Top100 prospects in those three years.

Compared to the Bruins and the Irish, Tennessee should count itself lucky sitting at 8-4 heading into bowl season. UCLA and Notre Dame are both 4-8 and missing bowls this year. But all three have something else in common: Their head coaches will be entering the 2017 season firmly on the hot seat.