Michigan Football Recruiting: Coach’s Corner — High School Rankings
Posted at 6:00am — 6/28/2008
Michigan Football Recruiting: Coach’s Corner — High School Rankings
A little rant about the high school rankings:
Rankings are a funny thing when they work out for the fans beat their chest and say how great of a class they have for this particular class. If they are not as high fans say well these rankings are biased and this kid is a sleeper.
Ranking by recruiting services create interest nothing more. We have watched enough high school football to be able to see that there are great kids that many people never even know about and could play if given the chance. As far as ranking go we think it is obvious the top 50 kids and then from about 50-250 you could throw many of those kids in a hat and not see much difference. To hard to tell kids apart when they are not all together and battling on the football field. Then you have the group from 250-500 and do the same thing.
We wish these recruiting services would go back and re-rank these teams 4-5 years later to see how they did, but they don’t want to because that would show how bad of job some have done over that period of time. All these ranking these teams by the numbers and not the quality of the kids or knowing that many of these kids will not even make it to college.
Before this season we didn’t even care about slot receivers and that has changed in a big way and we really notice that these recruiting services don’t do a very good job of covering or ranking the difference between the slot guys and the wide out guys.
We wish the slots had their own group instead of lumping them into the wide receiver group especially since scout has three different positions for linebacker and to me wide receivers and slot is the same difference.
Going back and looking at some of the rankings this year. In the NFL draft, Michigan had Jake Long go #1 in the draft and on scout; he was a top 20 offensive linemen, which is not bad for the ranking services. On rivals had Jake as the #20th best offensive tackle not offensive linemen, but offensive tackle so that shows me how flawed these ranking are nowadays and a lot of bias towards certain area with some of these area recruiting services.
Rankings are a lot of fun to look. They are great for conversation starters on message boards. They are still only one organization, or person’s opinion. Many of these rankings have more to do with how well players perform in combines. The combines where kids do not even have pads. Yet many fans take these rankings as gospel. Yes, some of the skills used at combines give you an idea if player possess the skill set to be successful at college football, but only guide, I do not care how fast you run or run through cones, you still need to possess some other necessary skills to succeed at football.
You need to see film and actual game conditions before you can be sure kid has total package to play the game. Colleges have graduate assistants who do nothing but watch high school game film breaking down every aspect of player’s game.
Then staff members do all kinds of checking. Other things like grades, work ethic, talking to coaches from opponents all go into decision-making process. We been told by most recruiting coordinators that they subscribe to at least a couple of services. However, this is just to double check names. To make sure they are not missing a player. None have used the services as rating guide.
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Written by GBMWolverine Staff
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