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2014 FB Recruiting Thread: Signing Day is this Wednesday!

DEACS76 said:
And well they should. Telling a kid that he has to take 2 years of a foreign language,calculus, science, etc doesn't attract the average jock. We need a unique student who can play football. Rivals,Scout, and ESPN do not consider that.
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The recruiting services cater to large alumni fan bases. Hardly scientific..
 
Line up the 3* players vs. the 2* players we've recruited over the last few years. Which group would you rather take? Which group has more starts per player?
 
Why has Grobe and Co offered so many 4 stars players on Scout? I guess he's just star chasing like the rest of those sheep coaches....
 
PhDeac said:
Line up the 3* players vs. the 2* players we've recruited over the last few years. Which group would you rather take? Which group has more starts per player?
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It's the individual, not the group that's important. The player who gets it the first first time the coach explains something. The guy who put a couple of extra plates on the bar in the wgt room. Maybe it could be said that the 2* tried to earn respect they never got in HS. You can't test character with a stop watch.
 
football recruiting is a numbers game, and the numbers say that higher rated players are generally better.
 
Stan Gable said:
Why has Grobe and Co offered so many 4 stars players on Scout? I guess he's just star chasing like the rest of those sheep coaches....
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Stan, the answer could be "Why not". Look back and you'll see that often we are looking at a teammate of the 4*. The Milton boys from last year is an example.
 
Rating does not equal destiny. If that was the case USC should have been the national champion last year because they were rated #1 at the beginning of the year.
 
Lohengrin said:
It's so obvious and simple I can't believe any rational person would dispute this.
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Scout.com rankings go back to 2002. The average team rankings since then are as follows: UNC 25, NC State 40, Duke 59, Wake 62. Our record over the same period of time against those schools is something like 18-8. We have had 21 players drafted over that time. Duke has had 1.
 
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It's not who they were, it's what they became.
 
DEACS76 said:
It's not who they were, it's what they became.
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I don't even understand what point you are trying to make anymore. First, your outrage was that a 3* kid who has been here for 4 years and therefore should have essentially been the next Mike Webster is a failure due to either his own lack of work ethic or the coaching staff’s or some combination of the two because he has yet to start a game at center, ignoring of course his contributions elsewhere along the line.

Now you are arguing that “rating doesn’t equal destiny,” which is more to the point but in contrast to what you were outraged about it the first place.

I don’t think anyone would try to argue the fact that on the aggregate, higher rated recruits are generally more likely to find more success on the field than their lower rated counterparts. As we all know though, the ratings are an inexact science filled with biases and sometimes questionable motivations.

If a lower rated kid establishes himself as a better performer once the pads are on in practice, I don’t think that is any more symptomatic of some larger failure by anyone and everyone involved than it is of a success on that kid’s part. And further, the specific situation you were arguing was between two kids with nearly identical ratings. We’re not talking about a 5* recruit who, as a 5th year senior, loses his starting position to some upstart sleeper walk-on. A 5* kid is not even likely to be around for any senior year, whether it be a 4th or a 5th.

Both Barnes and Helms were projected to be contributors at the college level and that’s exactly what they are, with one of them showing promise and filling a need earlier in his career. To call this a failure is ridiculous and disingenuous.
 
Rafi said:
Scout.com rankings go back to 2002. The average team rankings since then are as follows: UNC 25, NC State 40, Duke 59, Wake 62. Our record over the same period of time against those schools is something like 18-8. We have had 21 players drafted over that time. Duke has had 1.
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You can overachieve from the rankings, but it is going to be very difficult sustaining success doing that.
 
The rankings in 2002 were very different from the rankings now for a variety of reasons. Chris Barclay wouldn't be a 1* for any number of reasons.

Rankings are based on evaluations from people who know the game and offers from coaches. When somebody like Lectro talks about how rankings don't matter, he's spitting in the race of people like him and the coaches he admires.

Sure some players will develop late and/or fall through the cracks. I think we should collect data and develop models to determine where to find them. But we can't win consistently without beating peer programs or better for known talents.
 
Rafi said:
Scout.com rankings go back to 2002. The average team rankings since then are as follows: UNC 25, NC State 40, Duke 59, Wake 62. Our record over the same period of time against those schools is something like 18-8. We have had 21 players drafted over that time. Duke has had 1.
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The record among four instate rivals hardly provides data for a wholesale indictment of recruit rankings. If you took every Div I program and compared their recruiting rankings with their records over time, it's certain that you'd see a clear pattern emerge bearing out the validity of recruiting rankings.

Likewise, the development of a couple of players defying their ranking (either high or low) means nothing significant, only that those particular players were either misranked or overcame their initial evaluation. As ChrisL said, it's a numbers game and football is a game with a very large number of players in a program. You have to hit on most of your recruits to sustain any kind of success. Pointing out individual players at odds with rankings is a fool's game that only shows the obvious inexactness of the exercise, especially w/r/t lower ranked recruits such as the ones Wake gets. For reasons discussed at length elsewhere, Grobe struck gold with the Fresh Deacs class, but continuing to recruit the same level player after the Orange Bowl, which offered the opportunity to elevate our game, failed to sustain the success. That was predictable.
 
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PM, a player classified as a "contributor" who has been to all the practices and meetings and wgt room sessions should not be beat out by a "contributor with two practices under his belt. They are not equals. Watching Barnes play last year, he was stiff and off balance, I can see why he could be beat. But why did this happen? Why couldn't he improve his flexibilty. It would lower his center of gravity, improving his balance. Let watch Helms. He has a chance to hold onto the starting job for the next four years. A chance that Barnes could've had when Russell Nenon left.
 
How were the Fresh Deacs developed differentlly then the last few classes? was it their character or the coaches that made them special?
 
They were a perfect fit for Grobe's style. Self-motivated as well.
 
I admit to being concerned about Helms starting. I'm sure that he will be a good one, but you still have an 18 year old (I assume) going Mano a Mano with 21 year old 300+ lb DTs. That is a tall order.
 
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