Source Material: Original Post, Definitions, 2002 Class, Problems, 2002 and 2003 Classes.

The generally low level of activity on the last couple McBean posts is because the season is upon us. Or the posts aren’t very good. My ego and the advice of wolfman81 are sure it is the former; it appears this project is ideal for the off-season when football filler is welcome.

The plan, therefore, is to shelve for a few months the massive posts that rank the players class by class in exchange for amusing ourselves with surgically precise mgoboard posts that ask about individual players. Each recruiting class has a good handful of players on the bubble, and it is my goal to increase the survey participation beyond the current group of hard core McBean aficionados. This will take the form of an mgoboard post that has a short preamble, a link to source material and a survey about a single player.

My goal will be to get to 25 or 30 votes on each bubble player. If the mgoboard post falls off the front page before that total, then I will repost it at a later date. This should allow us to get to a statistically useful number of opinions about borderline players for when we finish the project in the off season.

Here is an example:

Preface: In August, I launched the McBean Rating System and asked the mgocommunity to help me rank every Michigan recruit at the end of their career as a point of comparison to their initial rating (using Rivals)*. Jake Long was a four-star recruit coming in and, after his career, he was a five-star going out. Kevin Grady was a five-star recruit coming in and will likely be a three-star going out. This subjective rating system depends heavily on definitions designed to maintain the same relative number of players in each Rivals rating bucket. The goal of the project: to develop a “collaborative, ongoing post-recruitment rating system that will allow us to determine if, in the Rich Rodriguez era, perfect-fit three-stars are more desirable than random four-stars.” In other words, to answer the Pat White question once and for all.

Player: David Harris
All American: No
All Big 10: Senior year
Drafted: 2nd round (47th)
Rivals: ***
McBean: ****
Bubble Question: Was David Harris a four-star or a five-star player at the end of his career at Michigan? (Please review the definitions.)

Good idea? Bad idea? Additional information needed? Board? Diary? Do you think this will be productive?

*Since that time, I can no longer take ownership of this project as there have been significant contributions from several mgobloggers; this is a mgoblog community project now.