Texas A&M already has the nation’s biggest recruiting class for 2012, with 21 players committed to next February’s class. Of that group, 11 are on the ESPNU 150 Watch List, which will be released soon. I got in touch with our national recruiting director, Tom Luginbill this week to break down the developments in College Station. What are your impressions of this class right now? Well, the first thing that jumps out is it’s stunningly large. Usually you don’t see this many verbal commitments out of anybody outside of usually the University of Texas, so it’s very clear that they’re making significant inroads within the state and seem to be resonating in a positive manner faster than ever before. I would venture to say that there will be a minimum of five guys in the first edition of the ESPNU 150 that will be Texas A&M verbal commits. Now, with that being said, and here’s the part we focus an awful lot on: Everybody seems to have the fixation on that five-star and four-star guy. But the reality of the situation is that the bulk of the roster of a top 25 team isn’t made up of those guys. It’s made up of the guys who were in the middle third and the bottom third of your class. Because if you took an 85-man roster and spread it over the course of four years and you have 3-4 classes with 20 guys in each class and the top 4-6 were five-star guys, that’s only making up a quarter of those 85 guys, if that. So the strength needs to come from the middle third or the bottom third of the class, and I would say that from probably the sixth or seventh guy  down — you get out of the way of the Matt Davises and the Trevor Knights and the Trey Williamses — if you start looking at the next 6-8 guys, that’s where I think the strength is at

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A&M building big things on recruiting trail