A very special email from BHGP contributor Hawkeye State:

Brian,

Because you are the de facto defender of recruiting services, I had to ask you this question:

David Barrent is a gargantuan offensive line prospect from West Des Moines. Relatively early in the game, and after a handful of offers from the middle-of-the-pack Big 10 and Big XII teams (Zooker, Nebraska, Minnesota, MSU, etc.), he committed to Iowa. Scout heralded his commitment in a breathlessly-worded post entitled "Four-Star In-Stater Commits to Iowa". Not only that, but they start the article with this paragraph:

While the state of Iowa produces a handful of high major prospects each year on the gridiron, the number of 'four star' prospects to come out of the state is a small one, perhaps one every other year. This year, there are three such players and one of them, David Barrent of West Des Moines (Valley) has committed to the Hawkeyes...

Clearly, Scout thought he was 4-star material. That is, right up until I received an updated Scout prospect list today and found Barrent had been demoted to 3 stars, despite the fact not one snap has been taken since that article in May. In fact, the only news I can seem to find on Barrent during that time is that he was the MVP of some camp in Chicago.

My question, then, is this: As a rational human being, how the hell am I supposed to take these guys seriously?

Subquestion: Isn't it in Scout's (and Rivals') best interest to have 4-star players remain uncommited until late in the game? If your team has a chance at picking up 3 4-star commits on the eve of signing day, aren't you more likely to buy a subscription to their sites to monitor their progress than if those players are 3-stars? Conversely, if you already have a 4-star in the bag, are you less concerned with whether you get another than if you have a 3-star and are in pursuit of a 4? Isn't this just blind self-interest? And doesn't that mean that the recruiting rankings from Scout and Rivals are no better than Lemming's Notre Dame worship? I'll hang up and listen.

HS

This is a common question, usually one offered up immediately after Recruit X has seen his ranking dinged after doing nothing in particular. Various points:

The guys running the sites are not doing the rankings. The breathlessly worded article referenced above was written by the Iowa guys at Hawkeye Nation [ grrrrr ... -ed], the Iowa Scout site. They have every reason to swoon so subscribers will be excited and happy. The men actually compiling the rankings are a different set of people.

The seemingly arbitrary drops aren't usually based on anything the kid does. Sometimes they are -- Michigan QB commit Kevin Newsome's been erratic at a number of passing camps this summer and has seen his ranking fall as a result -- but more often it's just a matter of early rankings being based on incomplete knowledge. This gets worse and worse every year as Scout and Rivals try to one-up each other with ever-earlier top 100 lists. A number of kids look good in early film and get rated high, then when film comes in on other kids or guys look particularly impressive at camp, they get slotted in above the previous high-ranked kids. This is no doubt what happened to Barrent.

High rated kids are far more likely to fall than rise. Howard Stassen maintains a list of the most overrated teams in college football based on a composite of pre- and post-season rankings. The top seven: Michigan(yay!), Texas, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Florida State, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, and Miami. Since the span covered is 1989 to present, this would also be a good approximation of the best teams in college football. Indeed, FSU, Miami and Nebraska are 1-2-3 in winning percentage; Michigan is #7, Texas #9, Oklahoma #13, and Notre Dame #17. How can the top three teams of the era also be the most overrated? Well, if you start off #1 you can only go down. If you start off outside the top 25 you can only go up.* (Washington State is the most underrated team.)

Four and five star recruits are FSU, Miami, and Nebraska here. It's a mathematical certainty that a player ranked at the very tippy top of a bell curve distribution of talent is likely to fall when additional information is incorporated into the rankings. High-rated commits are indeed likely to slip in the ratings, but so are high-rated uncommitted players. The difference is uncommitted players have no one to bitch for them.

End discursive points.

I think it's perfectly legit to drop this tackle without him actually doing anything except eating cheeseburgers. That's not to say recruiting services don't have their problems. There's a reason MGoBlog's season wrapup of recruiting doesn't just say "Scout ranks X, Rivals ranks Y" but has an extensive section on each recruit detailing his recruitment from offers to early rankings to camps to late rankings: there is information in there not encapsulated in rankings. I do think there is a slight bias towards uncommitted recruits, but that's because uncommitted recruits continue to pick up public offers and are more likely to attend the various camps both services run -- they're more likely to be in the limelight. But given the strong results put up by the ranking services in terms of both All-Americans and NFL draft picks, it's hard to dispute the usefulness of star rankings.

Recruiting services can be annoyingly overblown, maddeningly political, and barely English at times... but they've got that cheddar in the form of onfield performance.

*(this insight originally brought to my attention by Vijay of IBFC.)

Dear Brian,

Love the new digs. Hope you get all the bugs worked out the way you want them to. _____ questions:

1. Recruiting: If Jay Hopson isn't able to recruit MS players to UM, will he keep his job? Is it even possible to pull in recruits from that state without totally random MLB-playing uncles in Detroit?

We'll see what Hopson's haul ends up as at the end of the year. He's not just handling Mississippi, FWIW: he's also responsible for Oklahoma, where Michigan is in it for four or five high-profile players, and other sections around the country. Premium-board insider buzz is generally positive about his effort level and general personability.

I remain skeptical about recruiting Mississippi, which has some weird juju around it that causes kids to pick sure pain over, like, almost anything else. And their education system is somewhere between "nonexistent" and "Somalia" so the chances of picking up a guy who just can't stay eligible seem higher than usual.

2. Notre Dame: With Charlie's benefactor gone at ND and he has a mediocre to poor season, will the contract for life still prevent his firing (I really dislike him and the way he used the Saints to pry all that money out of ND)?

Kevin White wasn't actually Weis' main backer. The firing of Tyrone Willingham was done against White's wishes, as was Weis' contract extension. (Internet Notre Dame fans are still mostly in loooooove with Weis and universally loathed White, if that gives some insight onto the relative sides here.) Weis is likely secure until his heralded recruiting classes are upperclassmen. It would be hard to boot him until Clausen's a senior, IMO.

3. Zone-Read Option: Are there any examples out there of successful (meaning Alamo Bowl or better) teams running the Z-R-O based offense with non-Pat Whites at the helm? Going back to "Stalactites of Fear" I think that would go a long way towards calming some fears. I have heard of Sean King and his success at Tulane w/ Rod, but Threet and Sheridan are not NFL prospects. After that Woody Dantzler was the PWesque player for Rod at Clemson, and well are there any other examples out there at the BCS level? Rothlisberger at BGU with Meyer rings a bell, and Alex Smith as well from Utah, but what are the metrics we can use to compare all those players to what we have. I guess my question is: how much worse off are we with our talent at QB (passing and running)?

A couple of objections: Roethlisberger played for Miami. They ran a spread, but it was a M-versus-Florida passing spread, not the spread 'n' shred. And Steven Threet is not necessarily chopped liver. He was Rivals' #8 QB prospect two years ago, a four-star with a number of attractive offers. In an alternate universe where Carr is still the coach and Mallett is still around, I bet he's still your odds-on favorite to start this fall.

As to the questions posed... as I was writing my chart-heavy piece in this year's Hail To The Victors I assembled a chart. It was a glorious, glorious chart. I loved that chart, and love it still. Here it is:

Table 1: Yards Per Carry For WVU, NU, And Michigan In The Zone Read Era

Northwestern's offense under Randy Walker was basically the spread 'n' shred, except he ran it with guys like Zak Kustok and Brett Basanez and very, very little other talent (five offensive draft picks over the time surveyed here -- Michigan had five this year) and every year until the last two, when Walker died and everyone graduated all at once and the program was thrown into chaos, the talent-free Wildcats killed Michigan in YPC.

Steven Threet isn't Vince Young... but he might be Brett Basanez.

4. The Football Strategy Window: I agree with Chris at Smart Football and yourself that the Spread Z-R-O offense reached its zenith a couple years ago, and now that "everybody's doing it" the strategic advantage of running it has been diminished (I watched Kellen Lewis get shut down by PSU with a simple read-stunt by the DE and WLB). How likely is it that Rod and company would do a Bear Bryant style trip to Darrell Royal to learn a new offense (the Wishbone FYI) to stay on the bleeding edge of offensive football? I just want to know just how likely is it that Rod really does "not stay predictable" in the words of the offensive coaches.

I addressed this idea in a super-nerdy post in which I copped to a brief period of Magic: The Gathering participation. The main idea was thus:

Magic, like many games, has a distinct rock-paper-scissors aspect to it. If you have a Goblins deck it could tear through anything that's particularly slow but be weak against a "Control" deck designed to keep everything dead or immobile. And Magic, like many games, often inspires copycats when one strategy tends to win a number of tournaments in a row. Once Goblins start rampaging everywhere, everyone thinks that's the way to win and runs them, and it's at this point your lame-o Control deck can show up, lock everything down, and coast to victory. If this happens a bunch, the metagame starts getting split between Goblins and Control and a third thing that might do okay against both gets added in and so on and so forth. At any one time, there are usually two or three dominant archetypes and then scattered weirdos trying to invent a new one and almost always failing. When a weirdo breaks through, though...

Rodriguez is obviously one of the breakthrough weirdos, but now his offense is well on its way to becoming a dominant archetype. Michigan will never have one of those games like West Virginia's Sugar Bowl against Georgia where you blink five times and it's 35-0.

But the thing about dominant archetypes is this: they get dominant and stay dominant because they are better ways to do business. It's likely that Michigan will experience great success with the Rodriguez offense as-is because it's really hard to stop even if you know it's coming. I expect that Rodriguez will slant less heavily to the run as he acquires access to better downfield receivers and quarterbacks who are true run-pass threats and not NFL wide receivers; I don't think he'll have to reinvent his personal wheel to scratch out 30 points a game.

Thanks for everything,

Tyler Sellhorn

Teacher, Assistant Football Coach
Fort Wayne South Side HS

P.S. You had to crack on my banner entry, didn't you?

Dude...

...yes, yes I did.

Will the stadium already be louder next year with the renovations? The upper deck is there already and can keep the sound in. It's a matter of not having fans there yet. What do you think?
Robert Hovenkamp

I'm not a sound expert or anything, but I think the metal superstructure won't have much of an effect on noise levels this fall. Without a full glass wall to reflect sound right back where it came, most of it will pass right through the superstructure and much of what does get reflected will bounce harmlessly away from the stadium. You'll have to wait for 2009.