With Jerime Anderson's alleged transgression potentially serving as the fitting conclusion to the exasperating story that was the '08 recruiting class, I thought I would try to quantify the ineffectiveness of our futile five relative to other #1 recruiting classes in recent years.

I figured that the best way to determine the relative worth of a recruiting class would be to cut to the chase and look at win shares.  Basically, win shares tell us how many wins a player was worth to his team in a given year.  At first I looked at Total Win Shares over the life of the recruiting class and found the following:

Of course, I quickly realized two problems with this measure - it undersells the value of smaller classes (like the three-man LSU recruiting class of '03) and it undersells the value of Calipari's one-and-done mercenary squads seeing as how they made big impacts in very little time.  So I then looked at Win Shares Per Player Per Year and found the following:

I would offer further commentary here but I'm too depressed.