On the stupidity of Recruiting Rankings....

OK, I have carried on and on about the futility of ranking high school football players, and how you gotta actually translate that into wins in order for it to matter...and how these scouting services have really even seen a player play prior to "ranking" him....and they are 18 year old young men who are difficult to project under the best of circumstances (thinking back on myself, in fact).

So, NIU1981  has done something really cool...he has made the same point using FACTS.  Two big thumbs up for that dude.  In general, of course, any movement to inform arguments with facts could spell the end of the Internet, but for now, let's live dangerously.

NIU1981 looked at this year's All-MAC team, and then went back and checked out how the recruiting gurus placed them.  Then, BullRun went and put it into HTML and all that kinda stuff.

Here's the upshot (for Scout.com):

• Only one All-MAC player was a 4-star recruit...the heretofore unhearlded Cobrani Mixon of Kent.
• One two (Barry Church, UT and Adrian Robinson, Temple) were 3-star recruits.
• No offensive player was a 3 or 4 star recruit.
• Dan LeFevour was a 2-star recruit.  As was Freddie Barnes.  Namaan Roosevelt.  And Bernard Pierce.
• In all, nine players on the All-MAC team were 1-star recruits, including Stephen Williams and Antonio Brown.

Click the link to check it out for yourself.  The numbers are there for Rivals too, but it is just more of the same.

So, signing day is over.  Forget about it.  There are a thousand things that go into making a good football team, and let's be about the business of working those out.