Typically, these recruiting services assign a ranking, from two to five stars, to show the rating of the recruit. Each recruiting service publishes school recruiting rankings which are influenced by both the number and quality of recruits signed by the school. The rankings typically include a numerical value and a star rating. These proponents tend to give examples that show overall results using many years of data, while conceding that outliers can and do occur.
Some of the best examples for the benefits of recruiting rankings are given by sports writers analyzing years of data. Clay Travis shows that during , every national championship team, except for Oklahoma in , had at least two top 10 recruiting classes in the four years before the title. That is, over half of the roster was composed of blue-chip recruits. The opposing argument is that the ratings are not reliable and should be dismissed.
The proponents of this side point to specific outliers as evidence that the recruiting rankings do not matter. The outlier examples are teams with lesser recruiting rankings that win big or a star college player who was lightly regarded as a high school player.
This is seen as evidence of the recruiting services pandering to large and rabid fan bases for subscription revenues. Both sides of the argument have interesting anecdotal evidence.
However, answering the question accurately requires serious data analysis. Our paper analyzed the correlation between recruiting rankings and team success with a large dataset for all schools in the FBS. Our paper differentiated itself from previous studies in several meaningful ways.
Some get hurt. See recruiting notebook. An in-state defensive back is headed to the Pac and an SEC quarterback commit is still excelling at a second sport. Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.
All rights reserved About Us. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. Ad Choices. Recruiting operates on the same question, with measures for size and speed standing in for health risks. On a player-by-player or even team-by-team level, guessing who specifically will or will not live up to the hype, or will thrive despite a lack of hype, is almost always a fool's errand.
But the foundation underlying those predictions remains remarkably stable. The key is to think in terms of groups, not individuals. To do that, we have to start by creating a way to measure what the rankings project for each team. In the name of comprehensiveness, I'm using the composite team rankings compiled by Sports, an average of rankings from multiple services.
The designations are based strictly on the combined scores of the rankings alone, with no attempt to account for injuries, transfers, academic casualties, arrests or any other routine form of attrition:.
Note that, since , the eleven teams in the "five-star" group have combined for 21 appearances in the BCS Championship game, compared to one appearance by any of the 64 teams listed below. The lone exception in that span, Oregon, just barely missed the cut for five-star status. The only "five-star" teams that never played for a title in the BCS era are Georgia and Michigan; among the rest, only Notre Dame failed to make a repeat trip.
Over the same four-year span, those 75 teams played head-to-head 1, times. Here are the results of those games, with winning records in black and losing records in red:.
To describe those results as "compelling" would be selling them short. It's a landslide. On the final count, the higher-ranked team according to the recruiting rankings won roughly two-thirds of the time, and every "class" as a whole had a winning record against every class ranked below it every single year. The only exception came last year, when "three-star" teams came up short in head-to-head meetings with "one-star" teams.
Otherwise, the hierarchy held across every line. The gap on the field also widened with the gap in the recruiting scores: While "one-star" recruiting teams fared slightly better against blue-chip opponents than "two-star" teams, both groups combined managed a grand total of 19 wins over "five-star" opponents in tries. Broadly speaking, the final results on the field broke along a straight line demarcated on signing day.
Which is, again, about as reliable as we can realistically expect from a system designed to predict the future. Bill runs the numbers and finds they matter a lot more on one side of the ball. At the anecdotal level, let's take a look at how all of college football would've changed if one recruit, five-star Tim Tebow, had chosen differently. See how much one commit mattered? In closing, here are the 25 lies we will tell ourselves on Signing Day , mostly about how all our unrated recruits are as good as Ed Reed and all our rivals' recruits lack virtue.
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The last time Alabama lost to a non-elite recruiter was, what, against South Carolina?
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