No, Stars Don't Actually Matter in Recruiting (But Only For Michigan)

Stars man!

I don’t know if it’s stars or coaching but good things seem to happen when stars and coaching combine. 

Why did the recruiting thread last night get nuked? This board has some strange things happen.

Clicked just to see who the OP was and .... yup.

I've said it a million times and I'll say it again. The recruiting industry ain't what it used to be. Scout is dead. Rivals and ESPN are barely keeping the lights on. 24/7 can't scout everyone. Covid exacerbated all this. Big schools like Michigan scout better than all the scouting services combined. Michigan seems to be in a unique space where theyre not 'big' enough to be rolling in the 5 stars that are easy to find like Clemson/OSU/Georgia but plenty 'big' enough to have a great scouting department. Put all that together and it means we miss out on almost all of the highest rated recruits but almost all of our 3 and 4 stars (that we go hard on like OP mentions) are diamonds in the rough.

This makes no sense, no sense at all.

Which is probably why you posted it.  If your goal was to obfuscate, confuse and act like a Spartina, you succeeded.  Otherwise, wow, nonsense.

I don't know how much it's been discussed here already, but Michigan really changed its approach to recruiting when they handed the reins to Courtney Morgan earlier this year.  I read an article where he talked about making fewer offers, doing more in-depth talent evaluation and looking for guys who fit the system.  I read all of that to mean less time spent trying to lure every 5* to Michigan, and more time trying to find the next Ronnie Bell, Hassan Haskins and Rod Moore.  It's an interesting change and I wonder how much it has to do with Jim Harbaugh becoming Jim F'ing Harbaugh again.

Stars Matter: in our case almost completely Hydrogen and Helium. The reason it generates heat is a process called nuclear fusion, in which hydrogen atoms collide and create helium, and the byproduct is released in the form of electromagnetic radiation.

This is basic 6th grade science class.

"Stars matter but they're not the only thing"

... this whole original post in 8 words.

20 years of data vs. OSU recruiting suggest otherwise.

I'm euphoric over the glorious victory this past weekend, but 1 year does not a trend make, and 1 small  sampling of selected players does not a data set make.

Get the best players possible that fit your scheme.  Generally those will still be 4 and 5 star players.

If our identity is going to be Wisconsin + 4 and 5* skill position players, count me in. If the identity is simply Wisconsin or MSU - coach up 3 stars and build a power run game, OSU will continue to own us into the future.  Need NFL talent to beat OSU. Most NFL talent is 4 and 5 star recruits.

Some of us have pointed out that Michigan has beaten more talented OSU teams before. I hope this game has ended the "We cant beat OSU because we cant sneak up on them" and "we cant beat OSU because the talent gap is too big" and "We cant beat them because we take academics seriously". Harbaugh found the right players and coaches combo with this team to take Michigan to where it's always had the potential to go. 

Stars matter at Michigan too but I will say that this staff has excelled at finding diamonds in the rough.  Bell, Paye, Haskins etc are have all had had five star production and one of those guys was going to play basketball before we got in on him 

Beggers can't be choosy

I wrote about this yesterday. 

The recruiting looks at tangibles like height, weight, speed, and past performance. 

It doesn't account for intangibles like kids maturing later, character,  motivation, and ability to be coached up.

That's why people like Ojabo, Bell and Haskins, all three stars, have excelled and why Kenneth Walker, a two star, has lit it up this year.

It's also one reason why you see a number of guys in the NFL from smaller schools that couldn't get FBS offers.

One of the reasons for our current success is excellent coaching, especially Mike Hart and Sherrone Moore.

Ill make this easy for everyone. 

Recruiting head to head vs OSU the last 18 years

16-2 OSU 

Games head to head vs OSU the last 18 years

16-2 OSU

So here's the thing. You're wrong, but you're not that wrong. 

Stars do matter, but think of it like a bell curve. The top, incredibly high end elite kids will always stand out the most and garner the most attention. After that, it's a lot of speculation and putting the cart before the horse.

If Alabama starts seriously recruiting an underscouted, non descript 3 star linebacker, he's obviously going to blow up because of the focused attention on him and the recruiting analysts catching up to the coaching staffs. A lot of the scouting for these rankings is done during offseason camps in the summer. Combines and 7v7 and that sort of thing. 

So prospects heavily involved with other sports, or in more remote/rural locations like the midwest aren't going to be able to attend as often as prospects in the south east, because of proximity. There are more blue chip players in the south, so there are going to be more camps.

Now obviously Alabama and Georgia aren't going to send their coaches to watch some random games in Iowa, Wisconsin, or Illinois between smaller schools, so schools like Iowa and Wisconsin will actively discourage going to camps to prevent their under the radar gems from being discovered and blowing up nationally once they commit. So it skews the perception a bit.

There are plenty of guys that go blow up at the end during the all star game circuit now that scouts can get a better look at them against good competition. It's just hard to tell the 139th best football player in the country from the 489th alot of the time. Then development plays a huge role too. 

Who let you back in the country?

I thought you were in a Bolivian prison. 

 Metrics like this imposed across a large sample size are probably going to be somewhat inaccurate.  Some low rated players will end up good and some highly ranked guys will end up busts.  But it’s only the highly rated busts that people remember, not the legions of low ranked dudes all over the country that just don’t end up being all that great.  I’m sure the Michigan staff has a better grasp of the abilities of players that they scout than any national scouting service.  But that’s true for every big time program.  If your point is just that Michigan would be better if they could get the 20 players they most wanted than if they got the 24/7 top 20 players, then that just seems obviously true (and true for more schools than just Michigan). 
 

Taking 12 successful guys and saying you’d take them over a random sample of top 200 players is meaningless.  You could just as easily take 12 not so successful lower rated players at Michigan (not naming names) and say you’d rather have the random sample. But I’d much rather have a random sample of the top 100 than 101-200.  
 

The fact is that we don’t have access to the coaches’ internal rankings of recruits, and those rankings are usually confined to realistic prospects (I bet no basketball team had Jace Howard on their board), so the stars are a pretty good proxy to let us as fans compare talent levels.