Looking at Football Recruiting
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With the three most recent football commits coming in with very low ratings (0* to 2*), and lots of complaints on different message boards about UK not recruiting higher profile players, I thought I'd do a little homework. Ok, I'll admit I might have nerded it out a little bit here and spent way to much time on something a lot of you won't care about at all. After my blog post showing the history of UK taking low ranked prospects and developing them into NFL ready stars, I decided to do a little research to see how accurate Rivals and Scout are at ranking highschool football prospects, and how their rankings compare at the completion of the players careers. I think we can all agree that a first round draft pick is an elite athlete, and should have been rated as a 5* player coming out of High School. Of course there will always be a few busts and a few surprises, but take a look at the last three NFL draft first round players.
If you break these draft picks all the way down, the average player drafted was rated as a 3.48* prospect by Rivals, and a 3.29* prospect by scout. More interesting than the low overall rankings, are the extremes. Out of a possible 95 total first round players, only 13 were concensus 5* prospects coming out of High School while a whopping 17 players were rated as a consensus 2* or lower prospect, and two players weren't even profiled at all on either website. What does all this tell us? It shows that players develop the most in college, and that High School is all about potential. Understand that I'm not saying that what the recruiting sites say about a player is irrelevant, because they hit more than they miss, but that you shouldn't get down on the staff because a player doesn't have to be a 4* or 5* recruit to have a phenominal college career.
If you break these draft picks all the way down, the average player drafted was rated as a 3.48* prospect by Rivals, and a 3.29* prospect by scout. More interesting than the low overall rankings, are the extremes. Out of a possible 95 total first round players, only 13 were concensus 5* prospects coming out of High School while a whopping 17 players were rated as a consensus 2* or lower prospect, and two players weren't even profiled at all on either website. What does all this tell us? It shows that players develop the most in college, and that High School is all about potential. Understand that I'm not saying that what the recruiting sites say about a player is irrelevant, because they hit more than they miss, but that you shouldn't get down on the staff because a player doesn't have to be a 4* or 5* recruit to have a phenominal college career.
Comment
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Comment by The Fake Dermontti Dawson on October 27, 2009 at 12:54am - I see where you're coming from Darran, but I think we're looking at this from different angles. My angle is that if your assigning four and five star rankings to certain stellar athletes, the average first round pick should be somewhere between a four and five star player. Lets look at it like this, if rivals has a total of 406 four or five star players, I would like to think that 32 of those 406 would be first round picks. There may be 500,000 kids playing high school football this year, but those kids that are offensive guards measuring in at 6'1 190 pounds probably wont play in college. My whole point is that the scouting sites do a good job of identifying the top players, but that just because a kid is a 3* recruit doesn't mean he wont develop into a really solid college player worthy of being drafted.
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Comment by Darran Lavrin on October 25, 2009 at 11:42am -
I actually think this supports the rankings more than dismisses them. When you look at percentages. Only about 1% of all HS kids who sign D-1 scholarships are 5*. If the rankings didn't mean squat, you could assume you would have a roughly similar number of 1st round picks from 5* or one. But their were 13 and accounted for 13.7% of the first round picks over the last 3 years.
You can also use that with the 2*. If about 60% of all D-1 kids are 2*, then they should account for about that same number of picks or 57. They only had 17 which is 17.9%.
Just thought I would throw that our there. Sorry, the stats geek coming out in me again.
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Comment by C Dogg on October 23, 2009 at 3:53pm -
Thanks for the info. I've always wanted to see a breakdown of NFL players drafted and the star ratings.
I agree with Save that it is isn't near as accurate with football as with basketball. Morgan Newton was a 5 star most of the year on Scout but a 3 star on Rivals. There is never that big a difference in basketball ratings. I like Jeff Drummond a lot but he said on the radio the other night that Raymond Sanders didn't have a star rating on Rivals because Rivals' evaluators hadn't seen enough film of him. He plays in Atlanta and I believe he plays for a traditional power but Rivals hasnt' seen him enough to give him a star. Again, I'm a fan of Jeff Drummond but I found that statement sort of amazing. It shows how random football rankings are. I guarantee if Florida, UT and Georgia were recruitng him he would be a 4-5 star recruit.
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Comment by SaveUK on October 23, 2009 at 2:51pm -
Stars really don't mean a thing in football. How can any scouting service evaluate every HS football player much less evaluate them enough times each to get a good read on them?
Case in point - HOF's Blog
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