Well despite all the mischief, wouldn't you say that the teams finishing in the top 5 of recruiting every year also happen to be more often than not the best programs on the field? Maybe this is more a byproduct of the superiority of these coaching staffs than the actual recruiting classes???
I think there's certainly a correlation there, for the teams that can do it consistently anyway... UA, UGA, Ohio State, etc... You've gotta have good players to go
with good coaching. But, a lot of fans just put way too much emphasis on where the class is raked (or the individual player). A class rank of #2 vs. #6? Is this guy a 4 star or a 3? And this day in time, it's even more silly. Years ago, a staff worked hard to get a commitment. Then it evolved into you had to work and get them all to actually sign on NSD. Now, it's you have to re-recruit most of them every year and try to hold on to the ones you want/need while also still trying to secure and sign the new group of HS kids. What difference does it make if you have the #1 class, when 2 years later, a third or half of them are no longer on the roster?
And back to the evaluations... some of them are really easy to hit. But a lot of these kids play against weak competition and it makes them
appear better on tape than they actually are. Others haven't been well coached, or have maybe been slower to physically develop in some cases, and
appear to have reached their ceiling even though their potential is much higher. It's one reason why camps are so important to coaches like Saban, who can get a better evaluation up close and personal in a controlled environment. And while the exercise of rating and ranking that many prospects is certainly a difficult task for anyone... I'd love to see a controlled experiment where these Rivals, ESPN, 247, etc. evaluators ranked 500 HS prospects based off the exact same film and info given to some college head coaches, then they both put out their list independent of each other. Chances are the top 10-15% and bottom 10-15% would look pretty similar, but the rest of it, not so much.