Recruiting Services - Do Rankings Matter?

A news article written by Chris Talbot of the Associated Press reveals an interesting phenomenon in the recruiting of high school football recruits around the country that should have many finding reason to take great heart in.

Pointing out that while in a “football-crazy America, more attention than ever gets paid to the annual pursuit of the perfect recruit” – a pursuit that oftentimes includes the use of “well-funded scouting services with hundreds of thousands of subscribers” – the most talented recruits as measured by number of games started, recognition for awards received, and whether or not an individual was drafted into the National Football League, were with regularity those actually overlooked by both popular scouting services such as Rivals.com and Scout.com, as well as college recruiters alike.

Talbot draws his conclusions based on a study conducted by the Associated Press which found that when picking the 10 players with the brightest football futures coming out of high school, recruiting services identified correctly those who performed best at the college level little more than half of the time. The percentage was even lower, notes the article, when assessing picks 11-50.

Longtime evaluators maintain, says Talbot, that they are usually on target as much as 60 percent of the time – “a decent record,” his piece suggests, “given everything that has to go right for a recruit to become a standout.”

Yet, studying the numbers associated with a high school recruit’s 40-yard dash and bench press can only predict so much about that particular student-athlete’s true ability to perform at the collegiate level. Recruiters don’t, after all, generally have the faculty or foresight to predict how bad grades, immaturity, and injuries might drastically influence the probability that a given player might even make it onto the football field, let alone compete at an exceptional level.

Which goes to drive home the point made by Bobby Burton, co-founder of Rivals, that recruiting is ‘not an exact science, period.” There are going to be mistakes made. Burton admits, for instance, that Rivals rated both Heisman Trophy candidates Sam Bradford of Oklahoma and Colt McCoy of Texas as only three-star quarterbacks out of a scale of five total. Scout also, points out the article, rated West Virginia’s Pat White as a two-star player and ranked him the 53rd best quarterback prospect in the nation, suggesting, along with other evaluation sites that White might make a better defensive back than man under center.

Burton states that providing room for error is a necessary evil in a field that makes a business out of ranking high school football talent. There simply is no way, he continues, to predict what a youngster coming out of high school at 17 years of age is going to be like by the time he’s played a few years at the college level and graduates at the age of 21.

Still, working to improve the quality and accuracy of the evaluations posted on sites such as Rivals and Scout remains a featured priority. “We spend more than any single college in the country by far,” Burton comments in relation to the degree of resources his own Rivals has put out recently in order to bolster the assessments it provides readers on the nation’s most highly-touted college football recruits. “What a lot of people try to do,” he continues, “they try to be the reporter and the evaluator. What we’re trying to do is separate the two. I think we’ve taken it to a different level.”

Or have they? Talbot forwards the argument that college coaches, for the most part, deny that recruiting websites such as Rivals and Scout have any influence on the way they approach the recruitment of one player or another. Dan Mullen, the new head coach for Mississippi State, tells the author that he feels the sites are "a neat deal" due to the fact that they manifest greater interest in college athletics as a whole, but when it comes down to it, as Talbot writes, "the rankings [on recruiting sites] have little to do with the process schools go through to identify top prospects." Mullen continues, commenting, "We're digging. They [recruiting sites] might have a kid pop up on their screen, especially a secondary or tertiary player that we might not have been looking at. But I can tell you in the state of Mississippi, our top 25 rankings are very different than Scout's or Rivals' top 25 rankings, and those are the ones we go by."