You and I often agree, but we do not here at all. I think you've got it backwards on this.
First of all, schools that recruit highly rated players suck and fail fast. That's a dog chasing it's tail. It's completely false. That's what Coker did to ruin the program. You think schools recruit players based on how they're rated? That's just not true for good schools. It's the opposite. Rating services rate kids based on how they're recruited. If Nick Saban wants you, you're going to get more highly rated, because he's proven he knows what he's doing and he doesn't waste his time with kids who don't merit his attention.
The problem is that recruiting ratings are circular. They reflect which top schools rate kids. So yes, the best schools are generally good at evals and when they chase kids, those kids tend to be good bets. But that doesn't tell you anything about Miami recruits. Because 'offers', which casual fans go by, are relatively meaningless. Alabama sends out hundreds of offer letters. So do most top schools. They take 24 kids, give or take. And 'offer' letter is a 'hi, how're you doin?' note. An OV doesn't guarantee a kid will truly get commitment papers because some kids get dinged after an OV, but schools are relatively limited in OVs, so if a kid gets an OV to a school it's a reliable indicator it took him seriously enough.
All that aside, the rating services are at best aiming at statistical measures, because kids are probabilities, not certainties. The rating reflects a kid's expected mean, more or less, with some standard deviation up and down as a probability set. It's not a normally distributed distribution but forget about that for now. It's not even accurate to say the ratings are wrong on Miami kids, because those ratings include up and downside ranges, and exist amongst a pool of thousands of kids. Some will outperform, some will underperform. (They may be wrong but we'd need a lot more info to claim that.) You're just thinking about it wrong, IMO. What's happening is that Miami is selecting kids who are more likely to underperform their assigned mean, and it doesn't grasp why. The services are doing what they do, maybe well, maybe not, but it's not about our kids for them, it's about overall averages. Miami isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, however, which is picking kids well. Again, they shouldn't be picking based on ratings, but more likely, they're just failing to have a screen that picks up the things the rating services miss, such as cultural and personality traits associated with development (work, toughness, competitiveness). I'd guess that the simple combination of a poor cultural screen along with a bias towards highly rated kids (human flaw, they shouldn't have this) would model out to bad evals over time. Because what goes on is schools that know what they're doing prioritize some kids over others. If we don't have that lens, we end up biased towards kids some good eval programs don't want so much, because we think they're 'better bets' for us to get them. And maybe they are. But until we show that we know how to evaluate well, I'd take more comfort in looking at who we're competing with for kids than what their ratings are.
I acknowledge that this is overly general, because some positions are really hard to evaluate - OL and QB, e.g. My personal view is we've blown recruiting at DB, blown evals at LB, done pretty well on both at DE, blown evals at WR, done pretty well on both at TE. DT I'd say we're okay, probably have been solid enough for a while on evals considering we rarely get top kids (this year being an exception), but would like to see us recruit the position harder. RB we've been pretty good in both also. Our biggest eval weaknesses have been WR, LB, OL and QB, in my view. Our biggest recruiting challenges have been CB and OL. Edit: at LB, we have under-focused on recruiting the spot recently, so that's a recruiting issue, but we've signed some 'highly rated' kids and have definitely not evaluated particularly well. Probably can say it's a 'both' spot.
