“the fact that a kid isn’t a four or five star player is necessarily a negative because we just have no idea how they will actually play once the uniform goes on”

It’s so obvious it’s trivially true, we hear it all the time. Guy who no one has heard of blows up, Tom Brady goes in the 6th round, I’m sure there are a bunch of unheralded guys who become millionaries on Friday night. That’s fine – no one is saying that stars are the be all end all.

Maybe we think of this though: Tavon Austin and Bruce Irvin are the only 2 five stars on that list. However, how many 5 star players come to the Big East in a give year? Only a a few, so if five stars are becoming all conference players at a rate of 25 or 30 percent, that’s a pretty good bet. Similarly, there are some 3 star guys up there but dozens of 3 star players come to play in the BEast every year – that caliber of player is our bread and butter. And unranked players? Hoo! I was unranked coming out of high school, I bet you were too. It’s great that a few of them get on the list, but it doesn’t mean we should get all post-modern about how they looked coming out of high school.

I sometimes think of it this way. You’re not betting on a player, you’re betting on a percent. Each star has rough conversion rate of high school prospect into successful college player. Here are some numbers I will make up on the spot to illustrate:

5* – 34%
4* – 27%
3* – 22%
2* – 16%

So yes, you’re going to have great 2 star players just by sheer numbers. It’s the law of averages someone alluded to last night. However, if you’re a betting man, and all recruiters are, you take the higher chance.

Also, picking the all Beast team is a bad sample, as joke about above. That list tells me that when you get a bunch of 2* and 3* guys and put them in a league, someone has to be the best guy in the league. No doubt.

DCinPGH, I’m more worried about the ACC than the SEC, what are the odds Pitt plays an SEC team in a non-bowl scenario for the next decade? Almost zero. Screw the SEC, we don’t play them, we aren’t rivals with any of them.

I think we all wish we knew more about Pitt football than we currently do, and I feel like the stars are a way to peek inside and try to anticipate who will be a contributor and who we should look for, but at the end of the day we have to trust the coaches to find players they believe will fit the system. So far, nothing in Chryst’s track record suggests that he is bad at identifying talent.

And finally, just because it is fun to chum the waters for the sharks, Tino Sunseri was a 4-star recruit, according to ESPN.

At the end of the day, I’d rather have a great coach than a great recruiter. I think Pitt has the former in place with Chryst, and we just have to be patient and hope he can learn to be a great recruiter too.

“A poster on Scout linked an Athlon article on how stars do matter which, I believe, proves that if you account for the fact that there are so many more players in successively lower # of stars categories, the conclusion that high star ratings don’t mean anything is refuted.

It shows that the chances are better of being drafted in the NFL first round the more stars a kid has:

Percent drafted:

5 Star: 40-48% of the pool of 5 stars
4 Star: 9-11% of the pool of 4 stars
3 Star: 3.6% of the pool of 3 stars
2 Star: less then 1% of the pool of 2 stars (or lower)

Here’s the link cited–

link to athlonsports.com

It does, show, of course, that more than half of the high picks weren’t 5-stars.

In terms of college recruiting this means that, since the pools the less than 5 stars come from is so much larger, a coaching staff needs to really have scouted the less than 5-stars more thoroughly to find those that are really the cream of the crop because the percentage of high talent or high potential individuals in those groups is far lower. You have to cull the Revis’s and Dion Lewis’s out of a large group of mostly not so great (or not potentially great) players if you want to succeed big on 3-stars or less alone. You also nave to be careful (only less so) with recruiting 4 and 5-star kids to be sure you avoid the over-rated (or topped out) ones who will turn out to be under-performers at the college level.”

JP – no one can show you until 1) LOI Day and then 2) how well the kids actually play.

Here is a take on this subject using just PITT’s 2008 4* & 5* kids. It also doesn’t help that out of the 4*/5* players in the 2008 class six out of seven underachieved as compared to his star rating some drastically:

5* – Hale, Nix and Baldwin (The one exception)

4* – A. Reed, C. Burns, Saddler and Cross.

When you get two starters (over four years) out of your top seven recruits something is wrong with the ability to develop football players in that program.

This is just to show what we all probably know already, coaching by the staff matters as does the drive and desire of the players to acclimate and succeed in college.

I would also caution against using punters and kickers when figuring out the star average. As best I can tell, Scout only gives stars to just a few of each — and I think a 3 star kicker is a pretty high rating. When included with offensive and defensive teams, they are going to pull down the average (if only by a bit).

The bottom line is this. You can throw the star system out the window when it comes to a coaching staff wanting a particular player or type of player to be on their team.

You can see this in the reaction that the staff had when Orndoff verballed – there was excitement and joy among our coaches because they got exactly who they wanted and had been targeting for two years. It didn’t matter if he was a two star or a five star – the staff wanted him.

I know that the only thing the PITT staffs have used the star system for is to try to identify kids that were not in their core target group in the first place. These guys go into recruiting with a ‘Big Board’ just like the NFL teams and stick with that. Stars don’t really come into play – they are conversation fodder for people outside the decision making team. They will brag about bagging some 5* kids as DW did but they wanted those kids based on thier talents, not on their star rating.

Remember that these ratings are done on how well some website scouts think they will play in college not taking into account which school they will attend, how well the kid adapts to actual college life (a huge issue for a lot of players) etc. They are basically, at best, an educated guess on the part of someone who isn’t coaching college football. That is why you have wildly different star ranking between the three major recruiting sites for the same player sometime.

Look at Mark Myers – he was ranked 4* 11th best QB in the nation by Rivals; 3* 32nd by Scouts and 2* 102nd by ESPN. What type of star rating do you think he’s shown now going into his third year in college football? This type of things happen all the time and is a main reason what staffs don’t follow these rankings.

That said, it is also silly to think that when targeting players of need they would bypass a five star for a two star unless they knew something no one else did. But the difference between a three star and four star kid isn’t that big of a gulf in their recruiting efforts.

We’ll see Chryst concentrate on exactly the type of players he wants on the OL and TE especially and those may or may not be highly ranked but you can be sure they will be the type of player the staff wants out on the field.

1. It doesn’t weight the value of a player based on his position. A QB or a RB who is an actual 5-star talent is worth far more to a team’s ultimate success than, say, a single 5-star LB or single 5-star OL recruit. That isn’t reflected in your overall class rating very well.

2. It doesn’t account for how well a given class filled a team’s current and future position needs. A class loaded with 4 and 5 star skill position guys but woefully short on OL and DL for a team with plenty of talent at the skill positions but one that is very short of quality and quantity on the lines will be incredibly over-rated in terms of what is really going to help that team get better, or even stay where it is. Yet this underwhelming class in terms of need will be touted as a great class due to the number of stars it contains.

How much of a rating is based on stats? How much is based on pure athleticism? ???

That is why I don’t follow the Team Recruiting Rankings at all – they mean absolutely nothing for at least two years.

We have had it shoved in our collective faces as PITT fans that schools who ended up nowhere near PITT in the team recruiting rankings not only beat us on the field but also win BE championships.

Add to that the only school that every recruited “better” than us (WVU) under DW won championships also.

I just don’t think you can accurately say how a player is going to produce in college until he actually does so. I’ll refer back to that 2008 recruiting season we had – on paper it looked fantastic yet we only got two starting players out of three 5* and four 4* recruits.

So I also don’t think you can criticize a coach’s recruiting until you actually see how the players he does get suit up.