Star Ranking Review - 1st Round 2011 NFL Draft
April 29th, 2011 at 10:46 AM ^
You need to remember that there are like 40 5-stars and about 10,000 2-stars.
So if they produced the same number of first rounders, it means that the five-stars performed far, far, far better.
April 29th, 2011 at 10:55 AM ^
WE DON'T CARE BOUT MAFF WHEN WE HATIN ON RECRUITIN SERVICES
April 29th, 2011 at 11:00 AM ^
I think Scout does 50 5-stars, so this shows that if you're a 5-star, you have a 10% chance of being a 1st round pick - not bad. We'll see how many 5 stars end up in the first 3 or 4 rounds.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:00 AM ^
Also note that the first 10 picks were, by number of stars: 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 3, 4, 5, and 4. In other words,
"Recruiting is legit, yo".
April 29th, 2011 at 11:15 AM ^
They are the elite not some random fodder. The fact that five non descript players who the so called recruiting experts saw little to nothing in were selected in the first round of the NFL proves one thing. You can't measure heart or desire. Scout usually has at least 50 5 stars.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Elite vs. average at best. Can you honestly say you expected as many two stars to get drafted in the first round as five stars? If you say yes I call pure BS.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:29 AM ^
because of their heart and desire. They get drafted because of their awesome football ability, or because Oakland has a draft pick.
And yes, I would expect as many 2 stars to get drafted in the first round as 5 stars. If recruiting rankings were meaningless, I would expect far, far more 2 stars to get drafted in the first round than 5 stars.
Looking at total numbers is stupid. The point is that a 5 star commit has a far higher percentage chance of being awesome than a random 2 star recruit. Since you don't know how your recruits are going to turn out before their careers start, all you can do is play the percentages.
April 29th, 2011 at 12:55 PM ^
I said recruiting services can be wrong because they can't measure heart and desire. You can make yourself a better player. Patrick Omameh is a perfect example of someone the recruiting service didn't think highly of, but look at him now. That being said I would have rather had a five star at the time of his recruitment (both agree).
You honestly expected as many 2 stars to be first round NFL picks as five stars? It shocked me. It had nothing to do with percentage/number of five stars that are successful vs. two star (apples vs. oranges). It is expected that 5 stars have a higher success rate, but when looking at 32 players being drafted in the first round you wouldn't expect the same number of elite (even with far less of them) to be drafted as the average(based on HS recruiting rankings). After all, the first round of the NFL draft should is about the elite as there are only 1696 total players on NFL rosters.
Each draft has the potential of 150 five stars from Scout- RS senior, true senior/RS junior, true junior/RS soph. Five were taken.
You don't seem to get it. For the 150 Five Stars you mentioned there are thousands of Two Stars.
So five out of 150 is a much higher percentage than five out of thousands. Meaning finding a successful Five Star player is fairly easy, while finding a successful Two Star player is like finding a needle in a haystack.
It is supposed to be a much higher percentage. Do you really expect a two star recruit coming out of HS to get picked in the first round of the NFL draft- no and I don't care how many there are. So now we have 5 two stars picked the same number as five stars and that doesn't shock you? I realize that that may only account for a hundredth of a percent success rate for two stars and that's irrelevant to me as I don't really expect any two stars to get picked in the first round of the NFL draft.
That 2 star guys get drafted in the first round. I would expect it every single year. Why? 1- there are thousands of them, which means that the scouts got (this year) 5 of them wrong. that's a pretty low percentage. 2- College scouts have to project 17 year old kids into 22 year old men, that is even tougher than NFL scouts projecting college players into the NFL. 3- Projecting talent is just that-projecting-an inexact science that no one, not even the Patriots, has mastered.
No one (at least no one intelligent) feels that getting a 5 star kid or a 2 star kid is a guarantee of anything. But they are happy to get a 5 star and very cautious when a 2 star commits. And the numbers prove they are right to be so.
You honestly expected as many 2 stars to be first round NFL picks as five stars? It shocked me.
I didn't necessarily expect it, but it isn't exactly surprising. There are thousands of two stars, a handful of them that were overlooked by the recruiting services for whatever reason are bound to outperform the limited number of five stars.
I've always thought the best way to look at star ratings is like blackjack. Would you rather have a 10 or a 16? Sure, some 10's go bust, and some 16's end up winners, but in the long run, you're going to end up doing a lot better if you get a lot of 10's.
Now, the way you are looking at it is to play 150 hands where you start with 10, and thousands of hands where you start with 16. Then, when you end up with the same number of winning hands in each situation, you declare them to be equal. This is wrong.
Every year a handful of low ranked players are going to beat the odds, but most of them go nowhere. Expecting them to beat the odds due to heart and desire is going to get poor results.
This is honestly my new favorite analogy between recruiting rankings and anything else. I hope you don't mind if I use it every once and a while because the second you compared it to blackjack I instantly thought what a great way to explain why some players work out and others don't. This is true for college recruiting sites, NFL draft busts and then at the opposite end of the spectrum the Tom Brady's of the world and any other sport or human evaluation process. Sometimes there is no other way to explain who fails and who succeeds as there is to understanding how a 16 beats the dealer showing a 10 than doubling on 11 vs a 6 and somehow getting burned.
April 29th, 2011 at 10:54 AM ^
The fact that the state of Ohio produced 0 first round picks doesn't excite me the way it excites you, you do realize that half of our future recruits are now coming from that state, right?
April 29th, 2011 at 11:01 AM ^
I don't think anyone doubts that Ohio produces talent, it was just a dig at Ohio, which is always fun.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:12 AM ^
April 29th, 2011 at 11:02 AM ^
It's the school they select to play football for that matters. Ohio is still a recruiting hotbed.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:08 AM ^
Well, no, the comment was about players from the state of Ohio, so hometown does matter. If we're talking about school, then OSU did have a first round pick and we did not.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:08 AM ^
So the moral of the story is that it's better to be a 5-star or a 4-star than a 3-star or a 2-star.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:19 AM ^
When star ratings come with a guarantee, I'll be much more impressed.
Until then, I'll continue to believe that all the positive correlations in the world do nothing more than show that the folks at Rivals, Scout, etc., can tell a 5-star from a 2-star. I'm not as good at it as they are, it is not my profession, but generally so can I.
The problem I have with the way people treat star rankings is that they treat it like a computer game where the 5-star would always be better than the 2-star.
Then they dismiss the fact that 5 2-stars were drafted in the 1st round, by saying it came out of a larger pool.
If all you knew about a potential player was their star-ranking, this would make sense. But, coaching staffs know much more than that. I want Michigan to get the players it needs to win. I do not want Michigan to blindly chase some player because a scouting service has given that player more "stars".
April 29th, 2011 at 11:31 AM ^
is that you're assuming coaches take commits from 2 and 3 stars because they prefer those players to the 4 and 5 star players. Occasionally that's true, but usually coaches take 2 and 3 stars because they can't get 4 and 5 stars.
This is exactly the point.
+1 to you sir.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:46 AM ^
Rivals and Scout are not, really, for coaches. They are for us, the fans.
I would guess that most coach's, regardless of conference, use either to determine who they'll offer (I know there was a story of Randy Shannon doing this a few years ago, though). Rather, they tell us, the fans, who is in demand. As such, they do fairly well.
Remember, that stars are also driven by who coaches prefer. You don't really see that many kids end with a two-star ranking while holding offers from LSU, Alabama, Florida, and Texas - the sites do assign starts partially based on who the coach's pursue.
I heard that Coker's main way to compile a recruiting list was to look at the players' Rivals profiles and watch their videos.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:53 AM ^
You also get players at schools who don't get elite recruits, but who then get a chance to play significant minutes for several years. Take a look at Muhammad Wilkerson, for example. He was a 2-star to Rivals, but went to Temple, which isn't exactly brimming with 5-stars and 4-stars. He played a little bit his first year, saw starter minutes for the next two seasons, and traded that in for a 1st round draft pick. If he's buried on the bench at USC or Alabama for three or four years, there's no telling whether he would be a first round pick or not.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:20 AM ^
very telling that there were no 6-stars selected.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:26 AM ^
Assuming that there are about 40 5-stars in the draft (I'm taking chitown's word for it so... yeah), the recruiting services had 40 shots at picking the 30 first rounders. They got 5 right.
I'd say that was pretty good prognosticating from several years out. Getting 16% of the pool with a 12% hit rate from that far out is damn goo--especially since draft position wasn't even their critereon for star rating.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:46 AM ^
I might be wrong on this - someone should correct me if I am - but I think that projected draft position basically is the primary criterion that the recruiting services use.
April 29th, 2011 at 11:57 AM ^
It's part of it, but not the whole thing. Star ratings also take into account whether the player will impact his college team, whether he has All-American potential, etc.
I forget who it was, but one of the Rivals guys said one time that if a guy is given a 5-star ranking, that means they think he has a good chance of being a 1st round pick in the NFL. But 4-stars and 3-stars are considered to have unspecific "NFL potential."
April 29th, 2011 at 12:13 PM ^
Interesting.
Any idea how much the recruiting services take "fit" into account when they revise their rankings? For example, is it possible that some of these kids that Beilein's getting are ranked artificially highly because the recruiting services believe that Beilein will develop them better than other coaches would have? Similarly, would some of those slot receivers have been ranked higher for Rodriguez than for other coaches?
The services would probably deny that, but they have every incentive to do it, since it could make them look better later on.
April 29th, 2011 at 12:27 PM ^
As far as I know, the recruiting services don't adjust for team-specific positions. They don't particularly care whether a kid is going to play for Tom Izzo or John Calipari. A running back headed for Georgia Tech's triple option would presumably be given the same star rating if he chose to play for June Jones' passing spread.
April 29th, 2011 at 12:11 PM ^
The 2-starts were all D- or O-linemen. I wonder if those positions are harder to project coming out of high school because they depend so much more on the player's size and strength than other positions, and some guys keep growing in college? Whereas, it seems like with WRs, for instance, you would pretty much already know early on if a guy is fast enough and has enough body control to make it in the NFL.
Central Michigan...Wisconsin must have come in late...