Birmingham region top prospects show out at Nike Football Train
Some recruiting networks highly value Nike camps like this one. Others prefer to focus on game film. (Tamika Moore/tmoore@al.com)
(TAMIKA MOORE)
Few things get college football fans as fired up as recruiting rankings.
It's the source of countless message board discussions and arguments. All the major recruiting services -- ESPN, 247Sports, Rivals.com and Scout.com -- have their own set of rankings. They are a good indicator of future success for college football programs, though little is known about what actually goes into building the rankings.
There is a Wizard of Oz feel to the whole process.
It is difficult to know who is pulling the strings or why a specific kid is rated a certain way in the rankings. Why is one kid a five-star and another a four-star? Is it based on college or pro potential?
Fans can see the end result in the recruiting rankings, but rarely get to find out the why. Intent on offering transparency, AL.com spoke with national recruiting experts at the four major services to find out what goes into the recruiting rakings process and why they all differentiate.
Game film versus in-person evaluations
Each service uses its own set of criteria, and thus, no set of rankings is ever exactly the same. Recruiting rankings are inherently an inexact science so each talent evaluator is going to have differing opinions about certain players and their long-term potential.
The biggest factor, according to the experts, is a prospect's game film. This is where the experts can get the best feel for a player's actual ability in the flow of a game. For the majority of the recruiting experts, this is preferred to combines and camps. However, one potential downside is with the rise of Hudl and xOS, recruiting analysts now have to wade through more game film and highlight tape than ever before.
"It's always the film; the film doesn't lie," says Brandon Huffman, the director of scouting at Scout.com. "I want to see what a kid is doing Friday nights between the lines."
At Scout.com, the film is far and away the biggest priority. Huffman then uses events like The Opening and the Under Armour All-America Game as a secondary resource when considering where a player needs to be ranked. He stressed that you can't let a good or bad week at an all-star camp overshadow what a player did for two or three years in high school.
247Sports has a similar mentality. JC Shurburtt, a national recruiting analyst for the network, estimates that game film equates to 60 percent of a prospect's total grade. He uses those camps as a way to confirm what he's already seen on film and gives him a chance to see if a player's measurables actually match up to what he claims.
ESPN reviews the game film and then breaks it down to a "hit tape," which according to national recruiting director Tom Luginbill, culls from three to four games and is "comprised of really good plays, really poor plays and mediocre plays." Luginbill then use that information to put together the most comprehensive evaluation for each recruit out of the major services.
Rivals.com puts the most emphasis on camps and combines out of the four major recruiting services. It's not hard to see why given the company has made a major investment in developing its Rivals camp series and Rivals Five-Star Challenge. Detractors of the camp and combine circuit derisively refer to them as underwear camps, but Rivals' national recruiting director Mike Farrell believes those camps, along with the all-star games, are "the best you can get" for senior evaluations.
"Nick Saban and every other coach in the country is offering prospects at summer camps with helmets and nothing else," Farrell says. "They are all wearing t-shirts and shorts just like our camp. They are offering $250,000 scholarship offers based on "underwear camps" and that's been going on forever."
Farrell is quick to note that the camps also offer a better level of competition than anything a player will face in high school.
Do scholarship offers matter?
A common refrain heard on message boards and social media is that if a player has an offer from "insert your school here" how can he be only a three-star prospect? If a big school like Alabama or Auburn offers a prospect isn't there a good chance he's a four-star or five-star prospect?
The issue is that all scholarship offers aren't created equal. Each school has different needs and different systems, and thus targets different types of prospects. Farrell compares it to the NFL Draft where "guys will rate a certain position higher because it's a positional need for that team." Despite a team willing to take a player in the Top 10 of the draft, it doesn't necessarily mean he's a Top 10-level talent.
The same theory applies to college football.
Out of the four recruiting experts, Shurburtt is the only one who says offers factor in at all and he gives it only 10 percent of the total equation. One thing 247Sports does is look at the track record of college programs putting players into the NFL, especially lower-rated prospects. If a school is known for turning two and three-star prospects into NFL players, the analysts might give the school the benefit of the doubt when they offer a similarly rated player.
The other issue with factoring in scholarship offers, according to the analysts, is that not only do they not tell the full story, but they might not even exist. Recruits make up scholarship offers in order to get more attention. It would be incredibly difficult to personally verify every single offer that 2000 or more recruits claim to have.
Says Luginbill: "Some are manufactured by the kids and you don't know if he even has an offer or not. Other offers might be predicated on stipulations of coming to a camp or an official visit."
He additionally notes that offers don't reflect priority on a program's board. With schools offering more and more kids, a player could get a prestigious offer but behind the scenes he is the 10th best receiver on the board and the program only plans on taking two.
Who are the people involved?
Luginbill likens it to putting together a list of the Top 100 dentists.
The national recruiting director for ESPN says you wouldn't want someone without a dental background putting together that list, so why are people without a football background involved in recruiting rankings?
"We don't have anybody on our staff, including myself, that is allowed to make player evaluation assessments that hasn't been in the coaching profession at, at least the college or professional level," Luginbill says. "We don't have any writers, bloggers or journalists making assessments on football players."
Luginbill, who played college football at three different schools including Georgia Tech, coached professionally at the XFL, NFL Europe and Arena Football League level. He believes you need to be professionally trained to break down film and know what to look for in order to be an effective talent evaluator.
Huffman hasn't coached professionally, though he did play high school football. He's heard that line of thinking before, but feels his track record over the years proves he knows what he's doing. One of his biggest hits in his career was ranking former Boise State quarterback Kellen Moore much higher than his peers.
At Scout.com Huffman has the final call on the rankings, but takes into account all of the regionally based analysts the network employs. The network tries to meet in-person a few times each year, plus conference calls, to debate player rankings. Typically a regionally based analyst will make his pitch for a player in his region and then the group will try to come to a consensus. The different Scout.com recruiting analysts all have varying levels of football experience.
It is a similar situation at Rivals where Farrell is king.
"We go based on feel and experience," the Rivals expert says. "I've been doing this for forever. I can compare players now to players a few years ago and 10 years ago and 15 years ago and get a feel on their ability based on what I've seen in the past."
Each network has its own system for when and how it updates its rankings. 247Sports updates the most frequently of the four, frequently tweaking its player rankings when new film or information becomes available. The other three have a more traditional approach of updating the rankings on a set schedule, with the last rankings come out after the all-star games.
Another interesting distinction is how many five-star prospects each network has in its current rankings. Five-stars are supposed to be the best of the best and immediate impact players once they land on college campuses. Scout has the most five-stars in its current rankings (37), while ESPN takes a much more conservative route with only 20.
"What we are generally going to do is under-grade guys...it's one of the reasons why you see us without many five-star prospects," Luginbill says. "We try to err on the side of caution. If we are going to call a guy a five-star we better feel pretty confident that number one athletically he can fit the bill, and number two, that he has minimal or no red flags that can interfere with him maximizing his potential."
Why do they matter?
Critics of recruiting rankings are quick to reference the two-star or three-star prospect who far outperformed his ranking. These examples happen every year and will continue to happen every year.
But recruiting rankings continue to be good predictors of future success. There are always exceptions, but the schools that sign the best recruiting classes typically have the most on-field success. The last three national champions -- Ohio State, Florida State and Alabama -- have all done a terrific job signing top-rated recruiting classes. A 2014 SB Nation story showed that every BCS champion since 2005 signed more four and five-star prospects than lesser-ranked players.
All the recruiting experts are well aware that they will miss on future stars. Farrell says it's especially tough in states that don't typically produce a lot of high-level talent like New Mexico and Colorado. There will always be future NFL stars that will slip through the cracks for a variety of reasons.
Huffman believes recruiting experts seem to get an unfair amount of blame for those types of players, while college coaches skate free despite not offering scholarships. The public nature of recruiting rankings undoubtedly plays a role in this.
"You are making a projection like every college coach in America," Luginbill says. "What you are trying to do is make a projection based on the information you have, the expertise at your disposal and the knowledge.
"I say this all the time to our staff 'Don't be afraid to be wrong because you're going to be.'"