1) Star ratings continue to have meaningful predictive power even after we know about a player’s previous college stats.
For example, in the above table the average two-star sophomore has an efficiency of 96.3, while the average three-star sophomore has an efficiency of 100.4. That’s a difference of just over four points per 100 possessions. You might think these differences were all about the different skill levels when these players enrolled in college. But that isn’t the whole story. Even if a two-star and two-star player have equivalent freshman seasons (for example, if the two players both have an ORtg of 95 during their freshman season), on average the two-star sophomore and the three-star sophomore will have ORtgs that differ by 2.5 during their sophomore season. Even after accounting for college stats, the player with the higher recruiting rank will come out ahead, on average.
The reason is that high school star ratings are not just about how polished a player is headed into college. Star ratings also incorporate some information about a player’s ceiling. Even if they have the same freshman season, statistics confirm that the three-star sophomore has higher potential.
2) Other recruiting information has predictive power too, not just the star rating.
The recruiting services do a solid job evaluating three-, four-, and five-star players. There will always be noise and inconsistencies, but by attending the AAU and elite high school events, the scouts get multiple opportunities to evaluate the top players.
But evaluating two-star and lower prospects is notoriously impossible. They don’t get invited to the same elite events. And when they do play with other elite players, they often get overshadowed. Evaluating these players given all the major differences in high school competition is very hard.
Nonetheless, acting on a hypothesis from Paul Pettengill of verbal commits, I can tell you that there is additional information which predicts the performance of lower ranked players.
It turns out that the number of offers a two-star player receives has some predictive power for his college stats. Similarly, if a player receives an offer from a higher ranked program, his performance will also be higher. To summarize, an Iona enrollee that had an offer from Temple, Seton Hall, Fordham, and American will perform better than a player whose only offer was Iona, even if they were both evaluated as two-star prospects.
Bottom Line: To many reader’s today’s column may seem obvious and boring. Everyone knows that getting more highly ranked recruits will lead to more success. But not every piece of conventional wisdom is confirmed by the data. Sometimes we see enough players fail to develop and wonder if the recruiting rankings really matter. And while a players potential is far from the only thing that matters, (teammates and coaches can be even more important), there is no question that a players work ethic and athleticism is on display at the high school level. Recruiting rankings matter, and not just for the Top 100.
