In anticipation of Signing Day, Rivals.com announces the Seantrel Henderson Rule for determining which school has the top class. (h/t Dr. Saturday)

The top team in the rankings, on signing day, will be announced later than usual and only those players that sign a National Letter of Intent (NLI) that day will count toward a team’s point totals. Players not signing, prior commitment or not, won’t be listed as commitments until they actually sign. Essentially the prospects listed as signing his NLI on the official school press release will be the ones counted on Feb. 2.

Everyone clear?

Of course the rankings announced on Wednesday will only be as reliable as a verbal commitment. “Just like every other year, we are aware that there are players who delay their decision to sign and we always update the team rankings following each of those decisions,” explains Rivals.com national recruiting analyst Mike Farrell. This policy will potentially affect where Georgia’s class is ranked. Defensive line prospect John Jenkins won’t announce his plans until next weekend. That’s OK, because there will yet another set of rankings months from now when we all care much less and after the nonqualifiers shake out.

As always, Rivals.com will recalculate and reissue the team recruiting rankings in August in the annual Enrolled Team Rankings, essentially ranking the classes based on which players actually enroll in school and show up on campus. This is, arguably, the most accurate ranking of all but doesn’t get nearly the same attention as the National Signing Day list.

Somehow the suits at ESPNU should be able to do something about that travesty.