# Of low grade recruits

[Crawdaddy]

Why do we have so many recruits coming in with a low scouts grade of 40?
By far the most in the B.E,you would think being back to back B.E champs we would have less than most other teams.Player development doesnt always pan out.

[shaunsimpson]

Not low grade recruits just recruits that were not evaluated by Scouts, Inc. who prefers to evaluate kids with SEC offers.

[bearcatbret]

Keep in mind that many of these kids gave a verbal prior to their senior year. The recruiting services drop them from their scope once they commit to a team like UC. Many of them are coming from smaller schools that do not get any attention. We will have to wait two years to see if any of them pan out.

[Forsure21]

Until facilities improve the football team is always going to struggle recruiting

[oldcat48]

I think you're wrong, at least you're not 100% right. Playing at Nippert is tough when we're full - extremely loud and not easy on opponents.

Our weight room, locker room, training room, meeting rooms and other internal football facilities in the Lindner Center are brand new and first-rate, and the practice facility will be done by September (I heard the shovel's in the ground right after basketball season ends). I just don't think a recruit who loves and meshes with our coaching staff and sees all our new facilities would say "I'd go to Cincinnati if they just had 10K more seats in their stadium."

Waaaay too much credit is put in the ranking system anyway. I just saw a breakdown of the 5 star guys from 2006 and maybe like half of them didn't pan out into ANYTHING.

[mjb1979]

Bringing a kid to Nippert for a big game at night is one of the best recruiting tools we have.

[qsilvr2531]

I think you're wrong, at least you're not 100% right. Playing at Nippert is tough when we're full - extremely loud and not easy on opponents.

Our weight room, locker room, training room, meeting rooms and other internal football facilities in the Lindner Center are brand new and first-rate, and the practice facility will be done by September (I heard the shovel's in the ground right after basketball season ends). I just don't think a recruit who loves and meshes with our coaching staff and sees all our new facilities would say "I'd go to Cincinnati if they just had 10K more seats in their stadium."

Waaaay too much credit is put in the ranking system anyway. I just saw a breakdown of the 5 star guys from 2006 and maybe like half of them didn't pan out into ANYTHING.

Did you compare the breakdown of 5 star guys to a breakdown on 3 star guys? I guarantee the breakdown of 3 star guys has a larger percentage of players that didn't amount to anything.

[oldcat48]

That could be true - I didn't do the research, I just read the article. Here is the link:
http://cfn.scout.com/2/940369.html

Here's another article making a similar point:

http://www.collegesports-fans.com/football-recruiting/

In that article it makes these summary points:

1)Above all else, recruiting is an inexact science.

2)The more solid prospects a school accumulates, the more likely they're to find success in upcoming seasons.

3) For every five star recruit that becomes a star, there are two other highly touted players that fail to pan out.

4) There are always diamonds in the rough hiding behind two and three star ratings.

[Forsure21]

Bringing a kid to Nippert for a big game at night is one of the best recruiting tools we have.

For you but not for most of the recruits.

[Forsure21]

Who are the schools that one a NC last decade??? HMMMMMMMM.... Im going to think if recruiting matters.... USC, Oklahoma, OSU, Miami FL, Florida, LSU. Thats weird, those schools recruit the best and put tons of players in the NFL.

[qsilvr2531]

That could be true - I didn't do the research, I just read the article. Here is the link:
http://cfn.scout.com/2/940369.html

Here's another article making a similar point:

http://www.collegesports-fans.com/football-recruiting/

In that article it makes these summary points:

1)Above all else, recruiting is an inexact science.

2)The more solid prospects a school accumulates, the more likely they're to find success in upcoming seasons.

3) For every five star recruit that becomes a star, there are two other highly touted players that fail to pan out.

4) There are always diamonds in the rough hiding behind two and three star ratings.

You should probably read these two articles as well.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Mister-Relevant-Why-you-shouldn-t-dismiss-recru?urn=ncaaf,216887

http://www.athlonsports.com/college-football/13422/nfl-stars-how-recruiting-translates-to-the-draft

[oldcat48]

Thanks, those were interesting. There were several comments after the first article questioning the methodology. But ...if it's about getting to the NFL I think there's a clear correlation to having more stars on the front end.

The point is that for TEAMS you can't fully predict success based on stars. Also, we've seen time and again how a kid gets upgraded or downgraded based on the program that recruits them. It's like some of these ratings guys rely on the coaches to tell THEM who's good. OSU recruits a guy, he's upgraded. Bowling Green gets a guy, they downgrade him. That's rampant and to me makes the whole system suspect.

[mjb1979]

For you but not for most of the recruits.

You're right, they'd probably like seeing a game in half-empty Paul Brown Stadium better.

[qsilvr2531]

Thanks, those were interesting. There were several comments after the first article questioning the methodology. But ...if it's about getting to the NFL I think there's a clear correlation to having more stars on the front end.

The point is that for TEAMS you can't fully predict success based on stars. Also, we've seen time and again how a kid gets upgraded or downgraded based on the program that recruits them. It's like some of these ratings guys rely on the coaches to tell THEM who's good. OSU recruits a guy, he's upgraded. Bowling Green gets a guy, they downgrade him. That's rampant and to me makes the whole system suspect.

One of the reasons they get upgraded or downgraded is that they get more exposure and more time is spent evaluating them. It only makes the system suspect if it doesn't work (after all, recruiting analysis is an art not a science). If a good coach thinks a player is worth recruiting it makes sense to re-think their evaluation. It certainly isn't perfectly objective, but that isn't the same thing as saying it doesn't work.

You can't fully predict success based on any single factor in any sport on the planet. That doesn't really mean much. I do think that, among BCS schools at least, you can generally predict success based on star rankings within conferences. UC (and the Big East in general, though that has a lot of to with the fact that among BCS schools the Big East has the lowest recruiting scores) has been a major exception recently, but in general the teams with the highest ranked recruiting classes in their conference will tend to compete for conference titles and teams with poor recruiting classes will tend to finish at the bottom of the conference. Really, I think 4 and 5 star rankings matter and that there is a significant difference between those players and the 2 and 3 star players, but once you get into teams and conference that are comprised almost completely of 2 and 3 star players, recruiting rankings have much less utility.

[letharion]

You should probably read these two articles as well.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Mister-Relevant-Why-you-shouldn-t-dismiss-recru?urn=ncaaf,216887

http://www.athlonsports.com/college-football/13422/nfl-stars-how-recruiting-translates-to-the-draft

Recruiting sites writing articles making a case for people not to dismiss their ranking systems? Who'da thunk it, whether the content is true or not.

[qsilvr2531]

Recruiting sites writing articles making a case for people not to dismiss their ranking systems? Who'da thunk it, whether the content is true or not.

Dr. Saturday (Matt Hinton) wrote a blog called Sunday Morning QB prior to getting paid to write for rivals/yahoo. He had a very similar post on that blog years ago that came to the same conclusions. Here is a quick series of articles he wrote on the subject:

http://www.sundaymorningqb.com/2008/4/28/13464/0601

http://www.sundaymorningqb.com/story/2008/1/21/1614/43228

http://www.sundaymorningqb.com/story/2008/2/5/182213/3837

http://www.sundaymorningqb.com/story/2008/3/17/71811/4082

So yeah, he may have gotten hired in part because his opinion runs along the lines of "recruiting rankings are useful if not perfect" but his opinion runs that way mostly because anyone that spends any time looking at the data can see that it's the correct opinion.