Good. Your assignment for today: do the same analysis for all of Paul's 11 years. (Hey, you sorta volunteered, didn't you?) I'm pretty sure that'll restore your perspective.
Tha problem with looking at 2017/18 is that in both years we lost our starting BB right before the season started (Mills) or one game in (Benson). We have Mills in 2017 and we win 9, maybe 10 (Miami, UVA, TN, Duke). With Benson healthy in 2018 we win 9 at least (Duke and Pitt) maybe 10. You can't lose your feature back two years in a row and hope to get what you want out of the O.
Btw, I share your expectations about improved recruiting rankings. We'll have to see if that happens and translates into more wins, but I think they will. Coach is n0 slouch.
I wish I could look at the entirety of the 11 years, but 247 cuts the team talent rankings off at 2015. It gets a bit tricky before that because they stop tracking people who weren't currently on the roster in those years, but maybe I could do an averages thing. I don't have the time right now (pesky job getting in the way), but I will try to just dump everything into a spreadsheet and sort it out sometime in the near future.
In the meantime, seems like our recruiting rankings have pretty much been consistent over the last couple years and so have our performance rankings. Surprisingly, the 2015 team wasn't really that bad. Kind of makes sense since we had 6 close losses that season. Out of 65 Power 5 teams, here's how we ranked in each of those 4 seasons:
2015: 49th in recruiting, 45th (64 overall) in F/+
2016: 50th in recruiting, 34th (43 overall) in F/+
2017: 54th in recruiting, 44th (67 overall) in F/+
2018: 50th in recruiting, 54th (83 overall) in F/+
Last year really was just plain bad, it was CPJ's worst team (though not the worst record). I agree with you that if we dipped further back, we'd see the system as a great equalizer and I certainly believed in those earlier years we had a chance in every game. We actually had a really good run from 2011-2014, with F/+ rankings of 55th, 37th, 34th, and 8th overall, respectively. We had every reason to believe we were turning a corner, especially with our highest ranked recruiting class (39th) in 2015. But for whatever reason, in the four years following the Orange Bowl we have trended backwards and mostly stagnated as a program. Maybe it was Bobinski, maybe CPJ lost his fire, or maybe it was teams around us simply getting better at exploiting our weaknesses. I blame the financial choke-hold Bobinski put on the program whilst not capitalizing on momentum. Whatever it was, I think the early signs are that we're trending back in the right direction under Geoff Collins. And that's not meant to be a knock on CPJ, just a show of my confidence in Collins and his staff.