Kentucky Wildcat Football Recruiting: How do the rankings translate? Part III

(A short quarterback from Tennessee that was considered a two-star recruit until late in the recruiting process. He’s currently listed as the #29 player on ESPN’s big board)

For anyone who hasn’t been following, I’ve been working on a little project to see how accurate the website ‘Rivals’ is at correctly projecting a high school players college productivity. Because the amount of data I could have used is so vast, I’ve narrowed the pool of players I’m evaluating down to anyone drafted in the first three rounds of the three most recent NFL drafts. Hopefully, this will give us a better idea of how seriously the rating a player receives as a high school prospect should be taken, and how it projects to his likelihood of being one of the top 100 players drafted in the NFL.

You can see the breakdown of offensive players drafted HERE, or the defensive players HERE.

So with all of the primary positions accounted for, we can look at the process as a whole. Altogether, there were 293 total players in this pool. The breakdown of players picked in the first three rounds of the 2008, 2009, and 2010 drafts by star ranking is as follows:

Five-star prospects: 32
Four-star prospects: 81
Three star prospects: 90
Two-star prospects: 69
Unrated prospects: 21

You can look at this one of two ways. On one hand, 38% of the players picked in our pool were either four or five-star prospects, and that’s pretty good. When you consider all the guys that are new to football, or have played in the wrong system as high schoolers, or are just late bloomers, that’s a relatively high success rate.
On the other hand, that means that 62% of the players drafted in our pool were considered average or below-average prospects. A whopping 31% were actually rated as a two-star or lower. With ‘Rivals’ attributing a four-star rating to an average of 337 players per year, and an average of 36 players a year getting a five star designation, that’s a lot of misses.

The problem that you run into when trying to make sense of the ‘Rivals’ star-ratings is that the numbers have been skewing more each year. Between 2002 and 2011, the number of players that earned a five-star rating dropped from 60 to 26. The number of players that earned a four-star rating in 2011(306 players) was the lowest it has been since 2005. There were 6,028 players that earned a three-star rating between 2002 and 2008, or an average of 861 a year. From 2009 to this season’s class (2011), the average number of three-star players was increased to 1,150 per class, with a three year total of 4,531. The website is doing a better job of selecting the most elite players and separating them out than in years past, but the ratings become much more jumbled after that. Some guys that would have been four-star prospects before are three-star guys now. Some of the prospects that would have been viewed as two-star prospects before are now getting three-star grades. The quality guys that are not elite are all getting jumbled together and this can probably be attributed to the increased exposure high school athletes are getting in the internet age. Regardless, what all this data tells me is that the rating really don’t matter that much at all. If you need proof, consider that there were only eleven more five-star rated players drafted than unrated players in our pool. That pretty much says it all.

The 2011 Kentucky recruiting class has some players with big time potential and NFL bodies. Remember that Kentucky has sent Jacob Tamme, Wesley Woodyard, Tim Masthay, Stevie Johnson, Myron Pryor, and others to the NFL over the past few years and none of them was rated higher than a three-star prospect as a high schooler. If the current class can develop properly, the sky is the limit.

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