College football's National Signing Day is Wednesday so fans may be asking themselves these questions:
What do the star ratings mean, anyway? And do they really matter?
After all, college football recruiting coverage has exploded over the last couple of decades. More and more experts study these high school student-athletes before they officially sign on to FBS teams. With so many different rating systems out there, what to make of 'em all?
A good place to start, in order to get your head wrapped around the madness of recruiting rankings, is 247Sports.com with its composite ranking system based off the major recruiting websites.
Its composite rankings of top football recruits list 3,493 players from across the nation going from five stars all the way down to one. While incomplete, this provides a good idea of how many high school players are getting serious looks at joining an FBS program.
Create pie chartsIn comparison, the NCAA reported that 1,083,617 high school students played football during the 2014-15 school year. Unfortunately, this study did not break down those students by class. So, we can estimate that about one quarter, or 270,000 of them, were seniors.
If that's true, that means that about 1.3 percent of high school seniors are even on this composite list.
Of those 3,493 players, only 32 have received the coveted five-star rating. That translates to just 0.92 percent of those in 247Sports' rankings and about 0.00012 percent of all high school seniors.
There are 302 four-star recruits this year. Four-star recruits and above represent the top 9.6 percent of listed recruits and about 0.12 percent of all high school seniors.
There are currently 1,779 three-star recruits for this class. Three-star recruits and above represent the top 60.5 percent of students on the list and about 0.78 percent of all high school seniors.
All of those numbers should indicate how rare these recruits are in the grand scheme of things.
So, what do the star rankings mean as far as eventual football performances go? This is where things get a bit murky. The stars mean different things depending on what recruiting service you're looking at.
Syracuse.com did a great article back in 2014 on how the major recruiting websites assign stars to athletes. Suffice it to say that they didn't exactly agree on methodology. Some outlets evaluate players at camps, while others depend on film. And those that do the evaluating have a whole host of different backgrounds.
All of that means that there's a fair amount of subjectivity from the different recruiting services. How do we know how valid these rankings really are? In reality, we find out when these players take the field as part of their new college teams. Of course, that's assuming these players make the field at all.
A lot of people, including some players and coaches, claim that the star-ranking systems don't matter. To an extent, that is true. Not every five-star athlete lives up to the hype, just as every two-star athlete is not doomed to mediocrity. Universities have their own methods of evaluating which athletes will fit into their systems. J.J. Watt was a two-star recruit according to Rivals and now he's a three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year for the Houston Texans.
That said, the star systems aren't exactly worthless.
It's no coincidence that Alabama dominates on both the recruiting trail and on the field. You have to go all the way back to 2010 on 247Sports' recruiting rankings to find a year in which the Crimson Tide weren't on top nationally. Since 2011, Alabama has gone 76-8, won three national titles and hasn't finished lower than No. 8 in either of the major polls.
Every team that's won the national championship had a top-10 recruiting ranking at least once in the four years leading up their title win. Obviously, strong recruiting does help pave the way to championships.
The star systems may be flawed, but they're far from worthless. Take them with a grain of salt, sure, but as teams announce their recruiting classes this week, don't dismiss them either.