Question on the "star " debate
I was reading Brian's take on the Sporting Blog about "stars" for the billionth time on the recruiting wars and I thought of something that maybe the recruitnik's on the site may know. I was curious if they know of any player that was very highly rated on 1 of the services that didn't receive much interest from the "Big Schools(USC, Florida, OSU etc...)" strictly on talent and not academics or a drug incident. I'm curious if there was a 5 star or highly rated 4 star they thought was awesome and he only received MAC offers and he turned out to be awesome, that would be interesting. It's kind of a chicken or the egg argument. I would imagine if the kid didn't have any offers they would remove his stars regardless of what they thought. I assume that happens more often than they actually notice something on his new film they didn't already know. I'm convinced that if Rivals or Scout just broomed their entire staff and just had a guy look at their offer lists and based their ranking on that it would look pretty much the same.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:07 AM ^
I've been following recruiting closely since the class of 2006 signed, and I've never seen something happen like that. But that doesn't mean it hasn't happened, obviously.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:49 AM ^
your avatar is delicious. Who is it (my first thought was Megan Fox but I can't tell)? If it's Mrs. Magnus, you are a lucky man.
January 28th, 2010 at 10:10 AM ^
Miranda Kerr. Definitely top 5 in my book.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:33 AM ^
If a recruit loses a star all he has to do is call the United States Star Registry and for as little as $50 he can get another one. That one would even have a certificate and the exact coordinates of its location so it will never be lost again!
I got one for christmas and I am a solid 1 star right now. If I could just work on my pad level and get a few years back from father time I'm sure I could help out.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:46 AM ^
I've been following recruiting since the early 80s and I can't remember that happening. I have recruiting publications going back to 1975.
During the 70s, it was not unusual for a highly-touted kid in basketball to get more regional attention. Nationally-recruited kids, because of the absence of camps and other recruiting tools, were much rarer things.
Guys like Henry Bibby DID go to places like UCLA (Bibby is out of Franklinton, NC...an absolutely tiny town) and thrive. But they were very rare.
It was much more likely to see a guy like Benoit Benjamin stick with a school like Creighton. Or Dell Curry stick with VPI. Both of those kids were listed among the top players in their class. There obviously was no star-system and there were only about three people putting together lists of top high school talent. But both Street and Smith and the ACC basketball handbook list those two guys as rising stars before their senior seasons in high school.
(Joe Klein is another guy like that. He was a McDonald's All American who started out at Wichita State and, only later, transferred to Arkansas.)
Benjamin was in the same class as Wayman Tisdale, the consensus top player in the class of '82 (I think). Tisdale had offers from everyone and simply elected to stay at home. I don't know how many offers Benjamin had...but he chose Creighton? There was no "qualifying" issue at this point. Everyone recognized that he was an extremely athletic seven-footer with a soft touch...but he ended up at Creighton. And I don't think he's from Nebraska. I think he's from Louisiana. I'd love to know how Dale Brown let him get away.
That's the closest example I can think of that matches your question. I can't think of a comparable case in football. I'll go back and look tonight and see if anything jumps out.
January 28th, 2010 at 10:31 AM ^
Tyrik Rollison spent most of the year in the top 100 on Rivals with offers from Iowa State and Baylor, though he picked up some interest late from bigger schools and eventually went with Auburn. I remember looking at his offer sheet last year and being totally perplexed.
January 28th, 2010 at 11:37 AM ^
Rollison had some qualifying issues, which caused some teams to back off. Michigan was supposedly interested for a little while, but not enough to offer. Some people thought he was going to have to go to prep school in order to qualify, but somehow Auburn got him in.