Almost anyone, even your grandmas, can watch a football game long enough or give kids the look test and divide the kids into 3 groups with one group being the best, and so on.
They will miss on some, but overall be "statistically" right. Some kids ANYONE can spot. So the argument that the rating have merit by the star chasers on the web make me laugh. Plus the sites boost kids based on the offers as well, so its even less objective.
If that's not enough, it been ADMITTED, by the very people who RANK these kids, that they cook the books all the time to boost the ratings of the websites with large subscription bases. Knowing that, I am not sure what kind of person would defend the internet rankings, if not a "star chaser." That's the definition of.. well, use your imagination.
Internet website recruiting evaluators are just fans. They aren't employed as real journalists by any major sports media company, and they aren't even HS position coaches. They are former mailmen and fry guys... fans, who are unemployable by any metric by any real journalistic or sports industry standard. Any one of them would kill for a real job in sports. They squeak out a living off these rabid fan bases. Its entertainment purposes only.
You need to be able to evaluate, period. The very highest ranked class in UM history was LITERALLY its worst... Erickson's #1 class. And we can go on and on with that.
The Patriots had a team go 15-4 made up of 50% zero-2 stars. Repeat, we're not taking about a list of NFL no-stars, we're taking about over two dozen on ONE SUPER BOWL TEAM. They are all over the NFL and starring at plenty of colleges.
People can defend the star system and a bunch of low grade want-to-be reporters all they want, but anyone who actually makes a real living in football would laugh. What kind of program would let these yahoo's essentially decide who they recruit? A program with a new coaching staff coming down the pike pretty soon, that's who.
Your logic is awful here. If all you're saying is you want to give AG the benefit of the doubt on his specific evaluations until proven otherwise, fine, great, we all agree (or most do).
But as to the system generally, your comments aren't logical. You acknowledge that dividing kids into talent pools makes sense. You even claim its easy. Let's pause there. How do you go from that to concluding there's no information about kids based on which pool they've come from? Are you confused about the difference between probability and certainty?
You criticize the rating systems, and they surely have flaws, but (a) you started by acknowledging that the idea of dividing kids by talent is so easy your grandmother could do it, and (b) we know for a fact that the rating systems, however imperfect they are, are not bad at the divisions (5* kids out perform 4* kids who outperform 3* kids and so on, on average of course).
The reality is that the biggest bias in the rating systems is towards what offers a kid has, but this actually undermines your core criticism -- it takes the judgment away from the fry guys you reference and towards professional evaluators (college coaches). Kids who have offers from Alabama, USC, FSU, LSU and so on tend to be better prospects than kids who have mid-major offer lists. There are lots of potential reasons for the differences, and some kids have more risk and more upside, and some have grade issues, and so on, and evaluations are imperfect anyhow ... but for all that, the system IS directionally accurate.
The flaw most people make is in getting so worked up by the star whores they let their own logic fly out the window. Star whores are idiots, but the response isn't that 2*s are just as good as 5*s. It's that it's about evaluations, first and foremost, and needs and fit in addition. AG understands that.
Finally, coaching staffs may well ignore rating services because they know who they want. Fans do not have access to their evaluations, nor their rankings (to know who they missed on), so they're judging with less info. I understand the fans who avoid recruiting entirely as a result. But for those who want to follow recruiting, the rating services provide helpful info and a framework to assess it. What I don't get is why you'd bother follow recruiting but then not be willing to have a perspective on whether the staffs doing it well. That's strange to me.
