Harbaugh as talent evaluator
I decided to start taking a look at Harbaugh three star recruits over time because:
- Board folks have been shouting at each other and/or trolls about 3 stars for like a year
- I'm curious if player data can definitively show if Harbaugh is better at evaluating and developing high school players, and if so, by how much
This will probably be a diary one day with a spreadsheet others can play with but thus far I've compiled info for his two non-transition Stanford classes (2008 and 2009) and have some early, small sample size takeaways. Of the 22 three stars who enrolled from those two classes:
- 14 went on to be All Pac (six 1st team, three 2nd team, five 3rd team)
- 9 went on to play in the NFL for 2+ years and four are still playing but only three were drafted (one 1st rounder, two 2nd rounders)
- 5 left the program: three 1st year transfers while Harbaugh was at Stanford, one grad transfer and one injury retirement after he left
These are the only non-transition Harbaugh classes that have played out their eligibility so that's annoying from a sample-size perspective but the early returns reinforce the idea that he's pretty good at talent evaluation and that when guys aren't contributors they don't eat up very many scholarship years.
I'll look at the other Stanford classes and early returns on Michigan guys later this summer and also see what I can compare it to. Was mostly thinking of 3 stars when I started this but might also look at the guys ranked below that since three of those guys in the 2008 Stanford class went on to the NFL, too.
Who cares, honestly? Who Harbaugh recruited at Stanford and who he's recruiting here have no bearing on each other. If we're gonna make fun of MSU for having to settle for mostly 3 star recruits and having a ceiling, yet turn around and try to analyze how good Harbaugh is at developing 3 star under the radar guys, what is the point?
I care.
Is recruiting like a totally separate competition from football to you? Like... you feel that Michigan has "beat" MSU in recruiting and that is some kind of "win?"
Not me, a lot of the board though, yes. I understand MSU recruits who they recruit and they've made it work for a while now and regularly beat us. I think they beat us more because they have the right mentality than anything though. The point is the board is so quick to guarantee wins against them every year because we have more talent, yet posts like these get made. Makes no sense.
Maybe, don't make fun of MSU for who they recruit and just worry about U of M and their recruits.
This isn't a case against taking highly ranked guys. I very much like when Michigan gets elite, obviously awesome to everyone players like Gary and DPJ.
I'm curious if Harbaugh is better at talent identification than the services and other programs because if he is that's a big advantage. Starting with at Stanford data because he's only entering his fourth year here.
There are about 150 guys/year drafted who are ranked 3 stars or below and those guys are talent ID misses by the services for whatever reason. It would obviously be good for us if:
- Michigan's 3 stars are coming from that player pool
- The 3 stars that aren't contributors transfer early, thus reducing opportunity cost
I mostly agree...but I don't know if those guys are talent "misses." Numerically, there are only so many 5 and 4 star kids. Also, coach development at the college level is more important for those athletes than their high school ranking.
But in perspective, a 3 star high school player is likely one of the top 1400 high school seniors in the country out of approximately 300k. That's in the top half of 1%. They are still pretty damn good.
They’re talent misses in the sense that the rankings are based on the NFL draft. There are 32 5*s due to the fact that there are 32 picks in the first round.
Then there are more 4*s than the rest of the draft picks. So the bottom part of the 4* and the rest of the recruiting pool aren’t expected to get drafted according to their predictions. So anytime a 3*, 2* or an unranked prospect gets drafted, that was missed talent.
Point being, it’s an incredibly flawed system that fans rely on too heavily to base their opinions of players who haven’t even graduated high school yet. It’s wrong an awful lot. It isn’t very accurate. Yet there’s a large portion of fans who use these rankings as their only piece of data.
Is it intended to be an indicator of NFL capability? If so, then you are absolutely correct. There are too many variables at play to predict a 17 year old to the NFL, and outside of truly elite athletes, I haven't read a prediction of "playing on sundays" for too many high school prospects.
I'm not sure you can say that it is wrong an awful lot though. There are certain things that you cannot predict . Who would've predicted that Lamar Jackson would be a 1st round draft pick? Is that really considered a miss? If Chase is a first round pick this year...is that a miss? I agree it isn't perfect, but I don't think there is any way to get it right without a crystal ball. There's just no way to tell who is going to work hard enough in college, be in a favorable offense/defense to their skill set, have coaches who develop them, stay out of trouble, stay healthy, and beat out the other guys at their position, at their school, and then stand out at their position in their conference/nationally. It's hard to predict who can add 30 lbs of muscle and not lose speed. Now...Derrick Green...definitely a miss, and it seems as though everyone outside of the scouts could see it.
Depends on your definition of “miss.”
When you rank a kid in the top 50, and he doesn’t perform to the standards of a top 50 player in his class, that’s a miss. When you have a kid ranked in the 600’s and he plays at an All-American level, that’s a miss. That doesn’t mean the first player was a complete bust and he didn’t have a decent college career, but your prediction was off and that means it was still wrong. Obviously it can’t be 100% accurate every time, but you’d expect it to be within the realm of accurate. You’d expect a top 50 prospect to be one of the 2-3 best players on the team at the very least.
You can’t predict Michigan to go 15-0 and win a title and then say it wasn’t a miss when Michigan goes 12-2 and loses in the playoffs. Doesn’t mean it was a bad season, but you were still wrong.
But all of those factors you mentioned are exactly why the recruiting rankings are so flawed and why they’re wrong so much. There are too many other factors at play. That doesn’t mean they aren’t at all useful, it just means they’re incredibly flawed and what the rankings say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. That’s why people need to stop getting so worked up over every 3*
It's really not that wrong if you consider that the best college football teams sign the highest ranked players year after year. Of course a program can be successful with lower ranked players (especially if they're the guys with good offer lists) and I'm not sure how much I trust the recruiting sites right now. But it becomes that much harder to compete with Alabama, Georgia, OSU, etc.
I feel like this is something that everyone likes to conveniently forget. Whenever our school isn't pulling in as many 4*/5* guys as our opponents, then suddenly stars don't matter and the recruiting services have no clue what they're talking about.
But all anyone has to do is look at who teams like USC, Bama, Clemson, Ohio St, Oklahoma, Georgia, etc. are recruiting and signing each year.
If the recruiting services were as clueless as many on this board claim, then why on earth do teams as mentioned above always go after and sign as many 4*/5* players as possible? These teams always dominate the recruiting rankings and they are always listed at the top of the lists for having the most talent and consequently, they also win the most games and championships. They consistently field the best squads year in and year out.
So if coaches like Saban, Dabo, Meyer, Smart, etc. always go after the 4*/5* players, then it's PROBABLY because those are the best players 9/10 times.
This doesn't negate a lack of effort put forth by said 4*/5* players, once they arrive on campus, but I think it's abundantly clear that players with these rankings have the highest starting floors and highest ceilings 99% of the time and thus would be the most desirable players for coaches to recruit.
Agree with this guy. Star ratings are such a flawed system this research just cant predict anything with any certainty other than a higher percentage of 5 and 4 stars make it to the league than 3 stars, yet the sheer amount of 3 stars in the NFL is higher due to the 3 star pool being so much bigger than 4 and 5 stars.
Wasn't Bush a 3 star? If so, then that'll speak for his evaluation, as he wasn't well regarded vs his performance so far. And I think Eubanks was too.
And Gentry... I'd bet Harbaugh recruited him as TE, too,and says volumes. Gentry is gonna have a NFL career because of Jim.
Bush Jr? No, I believe his 247 composite ranking was 4*
Devin Bush was a composite 4 star (see link)
https://247sports.com/Player/Devin-Bush-Jr-38410
Gentry hasn’t beaten out McKeon yet. So claiming he is an unquestionable NFL draft pick is a stretch. But then you can’t teach 6’8” so in today’s NFL his size is intriguing.
Harbaugh also wanted to turn David Reese into a FB and AJ Dillion into a LB. Not to mention trying to turn Winovich into a TE.
They aren't necessarily talent misses - many just haven't yet showed the level of talent they will eventually have. It wasn't missed, it just wasn't yet there to see.
That’s not true either. A lot of the ranking process is based on projections and raw talent.
Guys like DPJ are ranked as high as they are because they’re super athletic. Fact of the matter is, the kid couldn’t run routes coming out of high school.
Joe Milton is another. He’s ranked highly because he has an incredibly strong arm. But the fact of the matter is, he has accuracy issues and he couldn’t even complete 50% of his passes in high school.
The rankings are meant to be predictive, and they fail at that more often than not.
I think everyone is missing one key factor that makes these rankings inaccurate. The recruiting services who rank these players sponsor camps, and kids that show up at their camps get rated higher than kids that don't. Some kids don't attend the other big camps held by companies other than the recruiting sites either, so those kids typically end up being ranked in the 500+ range.
When you have a kid that falls into this category, and they show up at a Michigan camp where the coaches offer immediately after seeing the kid in action, I still get excited about those ones.
The problem is the summer camps is where a lot of the evaluations are based. Some kids don't go to any camps at all. So they are @ a disadvantage compared to the guys that go to multiple camps every summer.
My guess is that people who obsess about the number of 3* recruits in a class care whether they will become major contributors or not.
Because we are college football fans and that's how we roll.
OwenGoBlue cares. He even started a thread about it. You're reading this in it.
Lots of people care.
First of all, it has nothing to do with MSU and who they recruit.
Second of all, nobody should care who MSU recruits, and making fun of them for who they recruit when they’ve handled us for the past decade is nothing short of pathetic.
Lastly, it’s at the very least interesting to see how a coach like Harbaugh is able to develop 3* talent over the years into highly productive players.
If the data shows that Harbaugh DOES recruit/develop those players into highly productive players, maybe that alleviates some of the temper tantrums people are having when Michigan does get a 3* commit. If the data shows that Harbaugh is indeed better at evaluating talent than the recruiting sites, maybe that will shut the star gazers up for a bit.
Is making fun of MSU for developing talent an actual thing? Making fun of Mork for being an ass-hat sure, I'm there on that one. Reality is MSU has done more with less "stars" than about any other team in the country, I don't really know what there is to make fun of in that regard. Slightly jealous of their success (on the football field) in all honesty.
Yer like the anti bluey. Its cool. Yeah. The eskimos have nine words for helmut stuck in a hot tub. Hell, they only got seven fer snow.
As Seth demonstrated recently, there are positions where starz matter more, and those are generally the quick-twitch players like DBs and WRs. On the OL, it seems starz matter the least. Intuitively this all makes pretty much makes sense. On the lines, physical and mental development is hard to predict. On the outside, it's simply more about speed and athleticism.
The other recent development is the even more questionable scouting by 2/3 services. So, obviously it's not all about starz, but it's still not entirely irrelevant. I'll take a DPJ over Csont'e York everytime.
See, that's something I've always wondered about - are the services themselves geared towards evaluating certain positions better than others? It seems like they might be, in my opinion, and it is for that reason, that it seems inherently easier to evaluate the positions where physical skills are more on display.
Seems like we should be able to pull in more 4 stars regardless of what Harbaugh thinks about developing the 3 star kids.
I do think you're going to find that a decent amount of our 3*s will be 4*s by the time all is said and done. Joey Velazquez and DJ Turner will both be 4*s imo based Velazquez actually being scouted as a legit football prospect and DJ Turner hopefully returning to his true CB position where he was a 4* until his coach moved him to safety. Jack Stewart could also get a significant ratings bump if he actually is scouted
Jack Stewart had already risen almost 500 spots now that scouts actually know who he is. He also boasts an impressive offer list. He doesn’t camp so more of a move would require scouts to head to the northeast and actually watch him.
Cade McNamara (while already a 4*) could be in line for a boost if he plays well at the Elite11/The Opening this weekend.
Karsen Barnhart isn’t far from being a 4* and he had a run of good camps a month or two ago that could lead to a ratings boost if that continues.
DJ Turner as you mentioned could be in line to return to 4* status.
Zach Charbonnet (again, already a 4*) doesn’t camp but is highly productive against good competition. If that continues this fall, I’d imagine he gets another ratings boost.
Joey Velazquez is a guy I can see getting a ratings boost, but probably not into 4* territory. While scouts may actually evaluate him, the issue is still that he doesn’t have a real position in a traditional defense and that’s going to hurt his grade. As perfect of a fit as he may be for VIPER, scouts don’t evaluate players for the VIPER position.
George Johnson III is going to be similar to Michael Barrett to me, where scouts don’t really know what position he plays so it’s difficult to evaluate him. That’s going to put a cap on his ranking, but isn’t indicative of his abilities.
Herron (already a top 100 player) has been having a huge week at the Opening so far. Could move up the rankings, and would be huge if we can hold onto him.
If one really looks into it, a lot of our players look like they have the potential to make fairly significant moves up. It’s fair to ask people if their opinion of a player changes if their ranking goes up? If so, why? He’s the same player he was before, scouts just took notice of him.
Yeah, didn't mention the 4* star guys like McNamara and Charbonnet who will likely receive big ratings boosts. Also, some people don't realize that some our 3*s are 3*s in the composite, but solid 4*s in the 247 rankings, which I think are the rankings that are usually held as gospel nowadays. Charles Thomas is a top 300 player according to 247 and Karsen Barnhart is top 250 player according to 247. Only composite 4* who is a 3* star for 247 is Trente Jones
My concern is that the 3 stars we took in 2018 were taken out of desperation after we missed on multiple top targets. That is far different than the ones we took in 16 and 17.
I was worried about that too, but I think the fact that they only took 2 offensive linemen is evidence that they weren't just taking guys out of desperation.
Who are they guys you think were 'desperation' takes? I've seen this mentioned in Brian's latest recruit overview of that DE from Florida.
I don’t think he was even a “desperation” take.
He’s a high upside guy with a lot of really good offers. Fact is, Michigan went out and got a guy committed to another good P5 school with good size and speed.
No, he’s not your instant impact recruit by any means. But I don’t really see taking a guy with a lot of potential and a slew of P5 offers as desperate. Michigan took a developmental prospect in a year they could afford to do it at a position they can afford to do it.
The question isnt whether these 3 star/ 2 star players are good. The question is whether they are good enough to beat psu and osu consistently. Jk Dobbins was able to come in and play great for Ohio State as a freshman. Do we have somebody with the raw talent on that level at the skill positions in the 2018 and 2019 classes.
But the main focus of the 2018 class was they didn't need anyone who was ready to come in and start as a freshman. They have all the depth they need for 2018 in the previous 2 classes. So they went after guys who they liked that could help in 2019-2020.
Ohio State/Bama basically have to get production from first and second year players- they are 5 Star football factories and have a lot of 3-and-dones. They are also subject to somewhat high transfer attrition since there is anothe wave of top guys coming in every year. The downside (if you want to call it that) to this is that 1.) you have to keep recruiting at the same insanely high level or you can end up with huge roster holes and 2.) you are always going to be relying on younger players that, while more talented, are routinely going up against older, more experienced players. This is why a low attrition, “redshirt just about everybody“ developent focused team that primarily consists of 3 stars (MSU, Wisconsin) can compete with an OSU. They are more subject to down years if a whole class of seniors totally flops (MSU 2016), but it can obviously work.
The three and done players are better than the four and five year players. Id take three years of Rashan Gary every time. System guys are fine but dantonio has a losing record against Meyer and i cant remember the last time wisconsin beat osu. We need 5 star and high 4 star cant miss guys to beat osu and go further in the playoff.
And how do you propose Michigan gets those guys? It's not like Michigan doesn't want to have their first choice at every position but this isn't a video game. They are going up against teams with a lot more recent success on the field, in the NFL, and with boosters. Clemson has shown that a mix of development and stars can compete with OSU and Alabama. And with some wins, recruiting starz will improve. Until then, I don't understand the constant posts about recruiting being "Unacceptable" like there is some choice by the staff to suck at recruiting.
Don’t argue with dumb people on the internet. This guy actually believes that the rankings are always correct and that 3* players can’t beat 4 and 5* players. He will point to statistics about teams with more starz beating teams with less starz.
He won’t understand statistical concepts like causation vs correlation or externalities that pollute results. Concepts such as better players playing for better coaches and highly scouted vs underscouted or even players fitting a system.
How anybody at Michigan, given John Belein’s track record, can be so dogmatic about rankings is beyond me. At least point to offer sheets.
They are dogmatic because they've read the conclusive data that proves that recruiting rankings are important to team success. They haven't read the rationale for why they aren't entirely predictive though
Let's face it. We're all being the kid in 4th grade who tried to convince the class (and more importantly themselves) that their mom's Dodge Caravan was actually WAY cooler than the Vette the dad of some other kid in class drove.
Didn't work then-wont work now.
I’ve never been laid in a vette ....
Doesn’t really have anything to do with football, but I’m a van guy.
Very good point!
Tell that to John Beilein.
So here's where I dislike the new MGoFormat. I can't easily decipher if this comment is related to getting laid in a Corvette or not.
No kidding. I know I want to debate somebody but I have no fucking idea who and I can't tell if we're going to argue about recruiting or talking cars Tuesday.
Btw the ban comment, who ever made it, was funny.
Also btw, the new site blows