why no stars?
Call me greenhorn, but...
Does anyone know why most of our players that have committed so far have no stars or are considered NR?
Does this mean:
1) Rich Rod is recruiting people that the Scout/Rivals types think suck
2) They have not gotten to that part of the world yet and will soon?
Not that it really matters, but if 1 is true will our national rankings will suffer dearly?
thanks in advance
Right up until NLOI day, the primary focus of those services was the 2009 class. Since they only have a finite amount of resources, it'll take a couple months until the majority of 2010 people are rated.
Not evaluated yet is all.
I always take initial rankings with a boulder of salt for a couple of reasons. First, the services haven't looked at every kid yet. Yes, they've looked at who most people are talking about but they haven't really looked at anyone else. And, these kids are still juniors. We all know that kids can have breakout or disappointing senior seasons which affect their rankings (although I think Scout and Rivals are loathe to admit that they were ever very wrong about how good a kid is so it's less likely for someone to see a huge drop due to a mediocre senior season than it is for a good/great senior season to vault kids up in the rankings).
Additionally, you have to remember that RichRod is recruiting kids for his system. Scout and Rivals rankings don't necessarily reflect RichRod's rankings since they're looking for different things. Think about LBs for instance. We're looking for slightly smaller but more athletic and faster LBs than other teams. But, those aren't the sort of measurables that NFL scouts like. Scout and Rivals predominantly go off of whatever they think the NFL wants. This is partially because then they can have stats about how many first-rounders weren't in the Rivals100 (3 I believe) which "validates" their rankings.
I'm not trying to say that rankings don't matter (see my diary entry about that), I'm saying that a combination of lack of time to evaluate kids, the fact that they're juniors, and that the services are looking at different things means that our initial kids probably won't be ranked as high as other schools (like OSU).
That doesn't mean our overall recruiting rankings should go down much. Regardless of the system, teams still want the best talent that they can get and then they mold it to what they need. So, it's not like RichRod would turn down Lache Seastrunk if he wanted to go here. Remember, we did go 3-9 and have another new DC. It's not surprising that every 5 star player (especially defensive ones) don't want to immediately commit to us. To be honest, what we do have is fairly amazing.
Something on this topic that I've been wondering about when people talk about star rankings correlating to success is have they differentiated between 2-3 start players who get recruited by Michigan, OSU, Florida and other major programs versus those who end up on MAC teams and the like.
That's a great question. When you're talking about what kind of player an 18 year old will become, the result is a combination of natural ability and opportunity. For 2-3 star kids, the latter will be in much higher supply at MAC programs, so I'm guessing that most of the 2-3 star kids who become All-Americans or are highly drafted went to smaller-conference teams.
I was actually looking at the issue in a different way. I was thinking that the 2-3 star kids at top schools were probably over looked and under rated by the recruiting services. I'm thinking of kids like Vincent Smith this year or Omameh and Odoms last year, who are looking like they will play a role this coming season despite being some of the lowest ranked members of the classes.
There is another issue - Scout needs to differentiate the assessed, no rank 1 stars (NR *) from the yet-to-be-assessed kids (which they also label NR *). The first is the result of their assessment of the player's ability, the second is simply due to a lack of assessment. I think it is somewhat sloppy, and perhaps a little irresponsible, to not establish some other category (NYA - not yet assessed? is that so difficult?).
They've only ranked their top 250.