Mailbag question: Recruiting services what do you think about them and their rankings?

What do you guys think of all the recruiting services rankings? On the Rivals site Michigan is in the top ten, where as the Scout site has Michigan falling out of the top 15 and dropping fast.

Fred

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Thanks for the question.

People all have their own opinions. Pretty plain and simple. Each site has different people in different areas, so whoever pushes their area higher gets players ranked higher.

There is a lot more than just Scout and Rivals for rankings. You have Tom Lemming, Scout, Rivals, Scout Inc, Emfinger, and so many other groups. (Back in the old days, Rivals used to take Tom Lemming's top 100 list and usually switched about five names on the list around.)

The best thing to do is not get all excited if your team drops a few spots or is higher in a few spots. Take them all, throw 'em together, and then rank them yourself.

One thing's for certain, with all these new all-star games coming out you will see rankings only get farther away from each other, rather than closer, because people are going to push their kids as being the better prospects.

Each site is pushing their rankings to be the better one, but nobody really knows until 4-5 years down the road who had the better team rankings (but what fun would that be to wait that long to say who is the best?) Another point about rankings is that some of these are based on how many recruits a team has: many times a team that had 25 recruits is higher ranked than a team with 17, even though the eight recruits on the bigger team might never see the field, but they generate more "points" to rank their team's higher. This indicates Quanity more than Quality.

What I look for is how many elite, highly-ranked kids you have compared to the other programs: take your top ten recruits and put them up against every other team's top ten prospects and see who is better.

There are also regional differences: Lemming, for instance, knows the Midwest and Big Ten area very well. Emfinger specializes in Texas and the Southwest. They also have hometown schools they tend to tilt towards. Our best advice is to be skeptical of all these rating systems. Wait 2 or 3 years and then judge by performance on the field. All these ranking systems will get some kids right, some kids wrong, and totally miss some others. There are no guarantees.

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