Football recruiting is creepy. More to the point, the attention paid to recruiting is creepy. It's off-putting that adults obsess over the decisions of teenage boys they want to help their favorite team win games, so that the adults can live vicariously through them.
Apparently there are enough of those kind of adults to support a robust faction of the media industry. The website rankings were one thing, but now we have the live television announcements with the played out hat tricks. Those theatrics (plus all of the de-committing and recommitting) irritate fans who follow recruiting but it’s their own fault. Give adolescent strangers attention and allow their decisions to affect you emotionally, and it’s not hard to predict what will happen.
Personally I don’t care about prospects until they actually show up on campus. But here is your reminder that those recruiting rankings really do matter. Some commentators like to prove that they don’t by citing the outliers, the five-star busts and two-star standouts, but that misses the big picture. On the whole the rankings do a good job of predicting which players will become stars and which teams will end up with the most star players.
See this Football Study Hall analysis for the details but the gist of it is:
Not to take all the fun out of it, but in practice, drawing conclusions from recruiting rankings is the rough equivalent of selling health insurance. Both industries are in the business of predicting the future on a large scale – of making bets, essentially – and both have sound, proven criteria for guaranteeing they bet right more often than they bet wrong. Occasionally, of course, certain individuals will defy that criteria.
Football Study Hall's analysis showed that while teams in the lower recruiting tiers sometimes beat those in higher tiers, the truth is that "sustained, head-to-head success against opponents that fared better in the recruiting rankings is much rarer." It also found that from 2003 to 2013, eleven teams from among FSH's "five-star" recruiting tier made 21 appearances in the BCS championship game compared to one (Oregon) from the 64 teams in its lower-tier recruiting groups.
It’s possible the College Football Playoff will change this championship trend: four-star recruiting team Oregon beat five-star Florida State to make the 2015 championship game, and four-star Clemson beat five-star Oklahoma to advance to this year’s title game. But then Alabama and Ohio State, both five-star recruiting schools, won the championships.
It takes more than talent to win big. Ask Mark Richt, Will Muschamp and Brady Hoke. But the evidence is overwhelming that recruiting rankings are useful in evaluating talent, and it takes a lot of highly-rated recruits to contend for championships or even win at a high rate against good teams.
So pay attention to recruiting rankings. Just try not to obsess over the recruits. It's creepy.
About the Author
