Shouldn’t the analysis of coaching staffs affect a rating? Isn’t it a data point? For instance, if Illinois gave a scholarship to a two star or low 3 star shouldn’t his rating increase because Bret is better at evaluating talent compared to whoever else is giving the rating?
Yeah, here are my thoughts:
1. The blue blood bump is real. Robert has written extensively about it. Recruiting services absolutely bucket recruits into certain ratings based on who they commit to.
2. At the same time, that’s not necessarily a bad thing?
Even if they scouted every high school football player (and there’s a lot of them), they’ll still have misses.
Why not rely on Ryan Day’s analysts to do the scouting for you? They’re probably better at it than you are anyways.
They’ll have misses too, of course, but that comes with the territory of ranking high school kids who weigh half of what their playing weight will be in 4-5 years.
And if you look at the 247 talent composite rankings, they’ve done a pretty good job:
In order to create the most comprehensive Team Recruiting Ranking without any notion of bias, 247Sports Team Recruiting Ranking is solely based on the 247Sports Composite Rating.
247sports.com
There’s some misses in there for sure. Clemson isn’t 5-5 if they actually have (7) 5 stars and (40) 4 stars (we have 0 & 7 for context).
I think where it gets really inaccurate is when you’re looking at up and coming programs like Illinois and Indiana. With our histories, our recruits are auto-slotted into a lower ranking than ~Clemson (or whoever), and it doesn’t accurately describe the level of recruits these two programs are bringing in.
(Illinois is #64 in the talent composite rankings, but #23 in SP+. Indiana is #72 in the talent rankings, but #2 in SP+).
That said, while you’ll have anomalies in any ranking system, they’re still fairly accurate, while doing a fraction of the work they used to.
