(02-05-2015 02:42 PM)Frog in the Kitchen Sink Wrote: (02-05-2015 01:16 PM)TrojanCampaign Wrote: But here is the interesting fact of recruiting.
Go back for 15 years and list the number of teams that finished with national championship. Then look at their recruiting classes.
I cannot thing of a SINGLE team that won a national championship and did not have a top five recruiting classes within two years of winning it.
Recruiting only does not really matter at the G5 level. You cannot really accurately determine what makes someone a 3 star vs a 2 star or a 2 star vs a 1 star.
I think that is true, but I wonder if it might not be correlation and not causation. A couple honest questions in my mind:
1. Is it possible recruiting rankings simply restating who the traditionally top teams are? Since the traditionally top teams are the most likely teams to have future success, ranking the recruits from those programs highly is always going to "predict" success. And if it doesn't for one of the traditionally strong team, odds are for another it will.
2. Is the continued success of the traditionally strong teams due to superior recruiting or could it be due to other factors- superior facilities, coaches, player development, schemes?
3. And then there is the question of opportunity. In the past did the system give the traditional powers more access to the national championship than non-traditional powers with lower ranked recruits?
Obviously if a coach at say Texas does a poor job evaluating talent the services could skew results, however you rarely see a Texas/Oregon/USC/Alabama being the only big name offering a kid. You don't often see Alabama sign a kid who has two other offers, one from Middle Tennessee and one from Arkansas State.
I suspect if you compared a low rated recruit who signs with Arkansas State and makes the NFL to a high rated recruit who signs with Alabama and misses on the NFL that you find (assuming no academic or discipline issues) that the lower regarded player probably played more snaps at Arkansas State and started more games. The difference in depth gave that player a chance to grow and develop more and it isn't like a Sun Belt player who plays four years isn't going to play 8-12 games against top schools so they can gain some truly valuable experience (AState had a true freshman noseguard start against Tenn and Miami this year because of injuries to the line).
The other thing to remember.
Recruiting rankings assess the player at age 17 or 18.
Four years (or even five) is a long time when you consider that you are dealing with people who are not yet at their physical prime.
The extreme example is Scottie Pippen. He was a little regarded six foot one player out of Hamburg, Arkansas who landed at the University of Central Arkansas and graduated as a six foot eight pro prospect.
Did the recruiting services "miss" on Pippen? I would argue not. Even his college coach wasn't projecting him to add seven inches in college. Coming out of high school he was rated about right (unrated). What happened in college changed his stock.
If the recruiting services were projecting where players would be in four or five years, then they are mediocre at the task but they are only assessing them where they are at that point in time.