Anyone out there read or seen good analysis of how recruits are ranked, and how overall rankings are put together?
If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to see it ... but I can't help thinking it's more art than science (at best; guesswork at worst). Here's why:
-High school football stats are unreliable. A team can go from winning 57-0 one game to losing 30-0 the next, to winning 17-10 after that (and these swings happen with far more frequency than you'd see in college or the NFL).
-That is to say: There's so much NOISE in high school; put another way, there are so many players on high school fields who will never play BEYOND high school that it would seem hard to evaluate yards, completions, TDs, etc. (Let alone DEFENSIVE stats, which even at the highest levels are harder to evaluate.)
-If you don't have reliable stats, you're left with the eye test: pretty subjective, and subject to all kinds of biases (recency bias chief among them).
-Obviously the very best — your 5-stars ... your Luther Burdens and DGBs — are so freakishly talented that they pop off the screen or just dominate a game you're at. But how do scouts distinguish between a "2-star" and a "3-star" or between 3 and 4?
-And on that note, how do recruiting rankings/sites/services get evaluated? Do they ever pay a price for being wrong, or does everyone just forget about their misses/chalk up those misses to poor coaching/development/culture at the college level? Are there objective measurements of whose rankings have performed well, somehow separate from what happens after recruits get to campus?
Would love to learn more about this all works, because I'm skeptical of the whole system. Thank you!
If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to see it ... but I can't help thinking it's more art than science (at best; guesswork at worst). Here's why:
-High school football stats are unreliable. A team can go from winning 57-0 one game to losing 30-0 the next, to winning 17-10 after that (and these swings happen with far more frequency than you'd see in college or the NFL).
-That is to say: There's so much NOISE in high school; put another way, there are so many players on high school fields who will never play BEYOND high school that it would seem hard to evaluate yards, completions, TDs, etc. (Let alone DEFENSIVE stats, which even at the highest levels are harder to evaluate.)
-If you don't have reliable stats, you're left with the eye test: pretty subjective, and subject to all kinds of biases (recency bias chief among them).
-Obviously the very best — your 5-stars ... your Luther Burdens and DGBs — are so freakishly talented that they pop off the screen or just dominate a game you're at. But how do scouts distinguish between a "2-star" and a "3-star" or between 3 and 4?
-And on that note, how do recruiting rankings/sites/services get evaluated? Do they ever pay a price for being wrong, or does everyone just forget about their misses/chalk up those misses to poor coaching/development/culture at the college level? Are there objective measurements of whose rankings have performed well, somehow separate from what happens after recruits get to campus?
Would love to learn more about this all works, because I'm skeptical of the whole system. Thank you!
