National Signing Day

Correct me if I'm wrong, but.....

I always got the feeling that the "ratings" of the high school players were essentially based on which schools were recruiting them. (Kid being recruited by Ohio State must be better than kid being recruited by Bowling Green.)

Which is fine, except then when people try to evaluate the recruiting classes, it's almost a self fulfilling prophecy.

Big schools get the best recruits, but we only knew they were the best recruits because they were being pursued by the big schools.

 

I'm waiting for the first coach to say " This class is awful. I didn't get any of the players I targeted, so we had to settle for this group. They'll be lucky to win three games by the time they're juniors, but that won't be my problem because I'll either take another job or get fired before then."

 

But we also know they're the best recruits because in three or four years their teams are the best teams. The kid being recruited by Ohio State must be better than the kid being recruited by Bowling Green? Well, yeah, that's why Ohio State wants him. Just like MLB first-round pick must be better than MLB ninth-round pick.

I don't go crazy about recruiting, but there does seem to be a pretty strong correlation to on-field success.

 

Too bad Mike London is such a nice guy. Oh wait - he can't be fired.

 

Right. People here, and elsewhere, often use the word "crapshoot" about recruiting and the draft. That's just silly. Of course no one expects every five-star prospect to live up to his billing, nor every two-star to live down to his. But generally, a random five-star prospect has a better chance of succeeding than a random two-star or three-star prospect. The correlation isn't as strong as some would like it to be, nor as weak as others claim it is. But it's there.

 

BB Bobcat makes a reasonable point, which is that to the degree that recruits are rated as a result of which schools are recruiting them, you can't (or shouldn't) use said ratings to evaluate the quality of a given school's recruiting class. In statistics parlance, you have the same variable on both sides of the equation.

 

I understand that the kids being recruited by the bigger schools are better. Because the coaches at those schools are making the evaluations.

I just think the recruiting evaluators are basically just using the coaches opinions, so when the coaches are wrong they are wrong too.

"Coach at Ohio State tells me this kid is awesome. Ohio State signed this kid. Kudos to Ohio State for gettkng an awesome kid."

 

So how does the MLB draft work? Did a bunch of independent draft prognosticators go out and scout Brady Aiken sufficiently to anoint him the #1 pick? Or did they take the word of the teams and scouts?

 

Covering NSD while also having a basketball game to cover 3 1/2 hours away is its own special brand of hell.

 

It's basically the same but I think it's to a lesser degree because no one really tries to evaluate picks out of the first five rounds or so. So you're talking about 150-160 players, many of which there are independent evaluations of.

Also, a lot of the players in the MLB draft are already in college so it's more possible to make an independent evaluation. For college signing day, you're talking about 3,000 high school kids (25 times 60 big programs)

 

Yeah, but those kids have a much larger and more immediate impact on the acquiring program's success than an MLB draft pick would.

Of course you're going to miss. Rodgers went to JC, J.J. Watt was a two-star tight end who went to Central Michigan, etc. etc. But if you take out the individual cases and names and look at the broad numbers, the effect of recruiting is pretty huge. Today's top 10 recruiting classes are by and large going to be 20018's top teams.

 

It would be much more realistic if the various recruiting rating sites and services, which are never going away, assigned schools to tiers on signing day rather than making lists. You can be pretty sure which teams were in the top 15, say. After that, it's very speculative. Same with the player ratings. Saying one kid's a five-star and another a two seems possible. Doing it the ESPN way and saying such and such a kid is the fifth rated tight end in the US is surely spurious.