Well, the crescendo that is the football season has come and gone. I hope everyone enjoyed the Super Bowl, but seeing as this is a Georgia Tech blog, we won't talk NFL, but we will be talking some football!! Right up until the big game, the news that was dominating talk radio and websites was the hell week that is College Football Signing. For the uninitiated, this is the time where colleges are seeking the next wave of high school football players and attempting to sweep them off their feet and into their programs.
While this is not a new thing, the way it is covered and the access to information has really changed the way players are scouted, schools research, players research and research companies......um, research. The Internet has allowed young players the chance to put together promotional videos and post them on YouTube as well as a ton of other sites. Scouts can even view high school games online minimizing travel time and expense.
As with all this information, the next logical step has been the creation of recruiting "experts". Those diehard fans of the great player shuffle will take their opinions to the airwaves and websites posting how one college program had a better recruiting class than another. They attempt to rank high school players using some mysterious calculating system and then assigning them a number of stars to designate their abilities. As with any classification system, the average fan can look at their favorite program along with their rival and compare "stars". At that point, they flood the message boards, defending or lambasting their program on how many 4 to 5 star players they got and how the program was going in either the right or wrong direction.
A key point of this posting is simple......stars are stupid. Not the young men who are listed, but the idea that you can take an 18 year old kid and identify their abilities to the point of giving them a specific ranking. I don't think there is a sensible person in the world who thinks that a young man who is listed as a 2 star player will end up stinking up the joint but a 5 star player will be perfect in any way. These are young men who play a game and have athletic ability, that is all. It actually does more damage than good to classify them. Think of it this way, if you are a young player who has done well in high school and been identified as a 4 to 5 star player, then everyone expects greatness from you. That is a lot of pressure on a kid who just wants to play a game.
Let's examine this from another point of view, shall we? Two of the teams from this year's BCS games (TCU and Boise State) are considered to be two of the best programs in the country right now. Boise State went on to win a major BCS game and finished the season undefeated and #4 in the country. After a brief review of the recruiting class that brought this success, one thing is certain, rankings mean nothing. Boise State's 2006 recruiting class (that was responsible for much of this year's success) ranked very low. Even a brief glance at the class itself showed one thing for certain, stars do not equal success. Want to see how they did?
Boise State recruiting (2006):
5 Star recruits - 0
4 Star recruits - 0
3 Star recruits - 3
2 Star recruits - 14
Yes, a team comprised of 2 star players won a major BCS bowl, remained undefeated and finished in the top 5.
All of this leads to my next column, which will focus on Georgia Tech's recruiting haul and how it stacks up!
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