Run-N-Shoot: Shooting Down Stars
by Luke Paul Chandler
For college football fans, National Letter of Intent day is the real Christmas. But are is the star system giving these fans a lump of coal every year?
By Andrew Calara
Signing Day 2008 has come and past, leaving new toys for next season and raising the hopes of college football fans around the land. This year, Miami and Alabama can celebrate their mythical recruiting titles, which is only slightly less mythical than the actual national title, if a whole lot less gratifying down the road. Fans hang the hopes of their favorite college football team on this latest batch of 18 year olds, many of whom are little more than a name, a 40 time, and a couple of stars to the majority of their newest fans. But how much can that really tell us about a player?
With the internet boom starting in the late 90s or so, coverage of recruiting has taken off to a whole new level. What used to be only really known to the most diehard of diehards is now easily accessible to millions of fans who get their hopes up every year. Sites such as Scout.com and Rivals.com are now big business, and even the World Wide Leader itself has jumped big time into the foray. The concept best associated with these sites is the star rating and their related recruiting rankings. As popular as they are, this system is deeply flawed, yet still manages to have some merit in the long run.
One of the biggest problems with the star ratings and rankings are that it is virtually impossible to quantify the talents of thousands of players across the country. Unlike covering the NFL or FBS football, where you have just 32 and 119 teams that all receive pretty good television and media coverage, there are thousands of high schools around the country, any of which could hold D-1 prospects, and many of them receiving little to no television or media coverage. There are only so many eyes out there, and often judgments are made from summer combines or very limited game viewing. Imagine if we were to judge NFL draft prospects solely on watching two of their games during their senior season and their performance during the NFL combine. We would still have some idea who could play and who could not, but the miss rate would be much, much higher.
Unlike D-1 football and the NFL, where teams all compete on a fairly similar level, the level of competition and teammates at the high school level varies wildly. How much of a difference in talent can we expect from a 4-star, #30 ranked RB from California as opposed to a 3-star, #42 ranked RB from South Carolina? They most likely played against wildly different levels of competition with wildly different levels of teammates. Not only that, it is very unlikely that one single recruiting analyst has actually seen enough of both these players to make a valid comparison between them. Yet why do we rank them on the same scale?
Sites like Rivals and Scout offer very little actual scouting information to player profiles in addition to their star ratings. ESPN offers more in the way of a scouting report, but game tape of high school games is often not nearly the quality of that available from any college or pro game. A 40 time and two sentence blurb tells little about how good a player actually is, how explosive and agile they are, how good their technique is, how smart they are on the field, yet for most prospects this is as much as you can get as far as scouting. And possibly most importantly, we know very little about the character and work ethic of these kids as they enter college. While this is tough to quantify regardless, and 18 year old kids change all the time, it is a factor that is completely overlooked by fans that are mesmerized by the stars.
Despite all of this, teams that do better in recruiting rankings tend to do better on the field. Just as if you gave an NFL team nothing but first rounders to choose players from, teams that consistently pick up four and five star players are going to do better on the average than teams that choose from nothing but two and three star players. But just as first round draft status does not necessarily guarantee success in the NFL, judging individual high school prospects off their star rating and their ranking is virtually meaningless. Any individual two star could end up better than any individual five star, just as any 6th rounder could end up better than any individual 1st round pick. Sometimes it’s just best to wait until they hit the field before you become too mesmerized by the stars.