My brother e-mailed me this observation he read today, which I thought was interesting. Kinda speaks to how big of a crock the high school recruiting star system can be. Twenty of the 31 first-round picks in the NFL draft received a three-star grade or below, while only 11 were rated either four or five stars coming out of high school.
... “Those of you who follow recruiting and the star system will find this interesting. In the first 31 selections of the NFL draft there were THREE non rated players, NINE 2-star players, EIGHT 3-star players, SEVEN 4-star players and FOUR 5-star players.” ...
I was intrigued by that point, so I applied it to the Georgia players who were drafted.
Marcus Howard: three stars
Thomas Brown: four stars
Brandon Coutu: came in as a walk-on, so I guess that means unranked
Chester Adams: three stars
Among the undrafted free agents:
Kregg Lumpkin: five stars
Brandon Miller: five stars
Sean Bailey: four stars
Fernando Velasco: three stars
Kelin Johnson: two stars
UPDATE WITH MORE:
Interestingly enough, there were a couple of blog posts elsewhere that fit into this subject, both of which I also found interesting.
* Here's one from the Birmingham News' Doug Segrest, about recruiting rankings of SEC teams versus the number of draft picks they produced.
* And another point, from Sunday Morning Quarterback, about how a five-star kid is substantially more likely to be drafted in the first five rounds than a four-star player or below. So there is THAT benefit to being a five-star guy -- while it wasn't reflected in this first round, five-star guys apparently stand a better chance of hearing their names called sometime.
Monday, April 28, 2008
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6 comments:
I have to disagree. You give me a college team of mostly 4 and 5 stars and a team of 2 and 3 stars and you have Georgia vs Vanderbilt. They do matter...for college. Time has shown that many "great" college players don't do squat in the pros and vice versa. It's just a different game, imo.
Alan Jones
http://www.alivemediaonline.com
What you have is a pre-college ranking, and a post-college ranking.
In high school, Lumpkin was a 5 star player. In college, after injuries slowed him down he became a 2 star player. A guy like Marcus Howard worked his tail off and improved a ton and went from 3 to 4 stars. Some guys weren't ranked because they weren't evaluated at all.
Point is, yes, its hit or miss, but injuries, off-field problems, work rate and coaching all influence how much those kids improve or digress.
And to the post above, most of the time I would take the guy that's been evaluated as a 5 star player then a 2 star player...but I'd trust my coach's opinion over a recruiting site any day.
I think it's extremely hit-and-miss. Extremely. Although I tend to put a little more stock in the evaluations when we're talking about a skill player than when we're talking about linemen (throw receivers in there, too). That's just me.
For instance, I was just looking over Georgia's 2004 signing class. Out of 20 guys, 11 were rated four stars or more. Three, maybe four, of those 11 were regular starters last season. One left early for the NFL (Charles Johnson), one was kicked off the team (Josh Johnson) and two have since left the team and never played much when they were there (Blake Barnes and Seth Watts). It's about like that in pretty much every signing class. You get a handful of blue chippers who pan out, but it's the less-recognizable guys who make up the bulk of the classes who determine whether the team's any good.
I agree in general that recruiting rankings are over-hyped. BUT, if we want to do this kind of analysis, we also have to take into account the original proportions of ratings. In other words, coming into college, there are a LOT more 2- and 3-star players than 4- and 5-star guys -- obviously. So even if only a third of draftees were highly-rated, what was the proportion of those guys in the original class? Probably less than a third...
that's a very good point. by the same token, the first-round picks were only 31 out of roughly 2,500 draft-eligible players. what's that, barely the top 1 percent? In general, I believe recruiting rankings are an OK measurement of the quality of a recruiting class. But if it were really the end-all, be-all most recruitniks seem to believe it is, I'd think a greater percentage of the elite draft picks would have also been elite recruits.
Along with Anon at 10:20... There are roughly twenty-five 5 star players in a given class. If 4 of them were drafted in the first round every year as they were this year, I'd say that's a pretty solid percentage and that the HS rating system may not be all that bad in predicting pro potential... especially since that is just he number drafted in only the first round
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