With 4-star defensive end Bryson Jennings committing Thursday evening to play football at North Carolina, the Tar Heels’ class of 2022 ranking moved up from 39 to 32. That caused some head scratching and even concern among some UNC supporters, but peeling away the onion some, it shouldn’t.

Rivals’ rankings are based on an accumulative measure in which each commitment for a school registers a certain number of points, so the more early commitments a program has, the better chance it has of being ranked highly.