How Recruiting Sites determine player rankings

[ellitor 34,379]

Over time many of you have asked how the recruiting sites determine player rankings, including a question on it yesterday. Well somebody must have heard you because a Syracuse news outlet just released an article with the final decision makes for all of the Big 4 Sites: Tom Luginbill (ESPN), Mike Farrell (Rivals), Brandon Huffman (Scout), and JC Shurbutt (247). Here is the Link and article

Syracuse, N.Y. -- Today's world of college football recruiting is snowballing with every class. More offers. More camps. More pressure from fan bases. More letters.

More underclassmen in high school focusing to attain the best numbers possible. More juking of the stats.

And publicly, the jump from a two-star rating to three stars can heavily shift perception. A player that just a couple days ago wasn't worth looking into becomes the next starting middle linebacker.

So with all the pressure placed on recruiting analysts, I decided to examine how each of the four main recruiting services (ESPN.com, Rivals.com, Scout.com and 247Sports.com) operates. I spoke with one high-ranking analyst at each outlet to understand how they go about evaluating and ranking players, and also the difficulties of doing so in an industry often propelled by fan bases, parents, camp directors and 7-on-7 coaches.

The results were intriguing. Some value camps. Others dismiss them. Same with scholarship offers. Some bring a football background. Others are journalists or bloggers. And some value immediacy. Others accuracy.

It's unlikely that every analyst at each company works exactly the same way, but the hope is to provide a baseline and a basic level of understanding as to why certain players are ranked higher or lower on certain sites.

ESPN.com | Rivals.com | Scout.com | 247Sports.com

ESPN.com

Tom Luginbill, National Recruiting Director

"I always use the term 'credibility.' I don't think it's fair to say we're better than this or that, but I think from a credibility standpoint, it's always been a mission statement of ours that if you're going to be a member of our evaluation staff, you've had to have either coached or scouted at the professional level for a living."

ESPN.com, like each of the other outlets, puts film first. Using full-game film on Hudl.com, an analyst first creates a hit tape with the good, the bad and the ugly notable plays for each respective prospect.

And in the cases when a player's film is difficult to obtain, ESPN.com will not lean exclusively on camps, combines and word of mouth.

"It really doesn't happen that often," Luginbill said, "but on the rare occurrence that it does, we'll get out on the road and watch them. The second thing I'll do is I'll contact some folks in the college game."

Next come supplemental sources including camps and combines. Often, this is an analyst's first opportunity to see a player in person. Confirmation is the main objective.

Other sites weigh camps too heavily, Luginbill said. While they can enhance a player's recruiting prospects and spread their name, they won't be enough for a college coach.

"Not a camp, not a free-agent tryout, not a combine, no matter what it is," Luginbill said, "that's not going to garner you a scholarship."

"... In football, the game can't be duplicated in shorts and shirts. It can't be duplicated during a vertical leap or a three-cone drill or a short shuttle."

Luginbill described the world of camps and 7-on-7 teams as "scary territory" because they insert middle men (i.e. coaches, trainers with a vested interest) into the recruiting process.

He also spoke about another factor that ESPN.com doesn't value highly in its rankings: scholarship offers. Since the NCAA moved the deadline for committable offers to be made from Sept. 1 of an athlete's junior year to Aug. 1 preceding their senior year, the amount of offers has skyrocketed.

Coupled with passionate fan bases and college coaches who may offer a player simply because another in-conference school offered, many players rack up 30-plus invites -- some of which are committable, some of which aren't.

"The whole offer thing always irks me," Luginbill said. "But when I bring it up to people and explain it, I usually get, 'that makes a lot of sense.'"

So after finishing each player evaluation, the ESPN.com analysts write sectioned qualitative assessments of each player, generally ranging from 375-400 words and centering on specific positives and negatives.

Luginbill emphasized that this is the most significant factor that separates ESPN.com from the competition.

"If they could do that, they'd be doing what we're doing," Luginbill said. "And that's not the case."

After 500 player pages are logged, ESPN.com releases its first batch of rankings for the class. For the Class of 2015, that was mid-April. The next batch will be released in a couple weeks. And when the third group goes live in mid-August, the ESPN.com team begins to investigate and evaluate the Class of 2016 prospects.

Ultimately, 2,500 player rankings are posted each year.

"We introduce our player rankings in stages," Luginbill said. "And the reason why, is because we're not working with an overly large staff, but we're doing a monstrous volume of work."

Luginbill recommends that readers put the most stock in positional rankings. That, he said, is where the team's credibility and in-depth analysis correlates most directly.

Rivals.com

Mike Farrell, National Recruiting Director

"It's subjective. It really comes down to what you as an individual evaluator like and look for in a particular football player."

After film assessment and in-game observations, Rivals.com next looks at camps to see how performances and information stacks up.

Composed of seven full-time analysts and a group of regional analysts, Farrell said Rivals.com does put significant weight in camps and 7-on-7 drills.

"People always point to, especially the spring evaluation where there is no football being played and the summer when it's mostly 7 on 7, they say 'Oh, that's underwear football. It doesn't count,'" Farrell said. "Scholarship offers have been handed out at camps for years and years and years."

However, Farrell said the two positions he doesn't put too much stock into at camps are linebackers and running backs. With tackling and avoiding tackles being a prominent part of playing those positions, it's difficult to gauge a player's ability accurately at camps.

For the most part, though, camps are crucial to the Rivals.com grading process.

"Anybody who says camps aren't an important evaluation tool probably isn't going to camps to evaluate," Farrell said. "If college coaches are doing it, then we're doing it."

Rivals.com analysts do not factor in offers for the same reason as ESPN.com.

"Offers don't mean anything nowadays," Farrell said. "The NCAA made sure of that."

Part of what makes their outlook unique, Farrell said, is the Rivals.com team's effort to understand trends in the industry, and adjust its ranking system based on them.

For instance, in recent years quarterbacks under 6 foot would rarely make a #Rivals100 or #Rivals250 list of the nation's best overall prospects, but the success of Seattle Seahawks QB Russell Wilson and Texas A&M-turned-Cleveland Browns QB Johnny Manziel changed the way the team grades size at that position.

"Big wide receivers were all the rage a few years ago," Farrell said. "Now we're seeing slot receivers come back to prominence."

With the data collected, Rivals.com assigns its individual player rankings and ultimately positional, national and state rankings.

As far as ranking releases, Farrell said the timeline changes every year.

The typical cycle has five main release points: February, May, August, early December and mid-January. As the interest in recruiting ramps up, and younger players receive more and more offers, Rivals.com pushes to get more and more players ranked earlier and earlier each class.

Scout.com

Brandon Huffman, National Recruiting Analyst

"There's a danger I feel in quickly trying to put a star on a kid. I think some networks will put a star rating the second they first find out about a kid, and then they go back, evaluate and analyze and realize, 'Hey maybe we were a little bit hasty in giving those stars.'"

Scout.com uses XOS Digital, a video service that Huffman said 300 colleges also use, to find film for any players who don't send it themselves or post online.

"The first thing that we kind of have to distinguish is good high school football player or legitimate Division I football prospect?" Huffman said.

Huffman said about 10 to 15 percent of players he looks at go into the Division-I prospect pile. Sometimes, though, the first contact still comes in-person at a game or at a 7-on-7 competition.

From there, Scout.com does its best to get sufficient full-game film. Huffman tries not to rely on highlight reels that don't show a player's consistency and competition level.

"Its like college coaches say: we'll recruit off a highlight film. We'll offer off a game film," Huffman said. "That's kind of the same way with us.

We'll watch the highlight film, but the more thorough evaluations are typically done by watching full-game film."

Still, "a good number" of players are given stars with no film. Many of these players aren't profiled until late in the process as Huffman said Scout.com gives stars to every player who signs at a D-I school.

"There really are guys who still fall through the cracks," Huffman said.

The next step for those players with accessible film is camps. Scout.com uses them for confirmation of size and athleticism.

In addition to the previously mentioned knocks on camps, Huffman noted that the linemen drills are generally set up for the defensive linemen.

So in a 1-on-1 drill, factors like the quarterback stepping up on an outside rush can't be measured.

"In a lot of cases, what a player really excels at, a T-shirt and short setting, a camp setting, doesn't allow them to showcase that," Huffman said.

He recalled watching a 7-on-7 team of 0-4 in Las Vegas a few years back. The quarterback? Current Oregon Heisman candidate Marcus Mariota.

Huffman said Scout.com doesn't put much weight into offers, but tries to understand which offers are committable.

"You have to dwindle the offers to real offers," Huffman said. "You have thirty schools that offer a kid but only five schools would take him. But the (other) schools still want those checkmarks there."

Scout.com releases its rankings as many as eight times, excluding "extreme" exceptions:

• The summer before a player's junior year (last August for the Class of 2015)
  
  
• The day after National Signing Day (Feb. 6 for the Class of 2015)
  
  
• The beginning of April, right before the pre-evaluation period
  
  
• Early June, after the pre-evaluation period
  
  
• Mid August, after college camps, tournaments and 7-on-7 camps ends
  
  
• Mid October of a player's senior year
  
  
• December of a player's senior year, generally including the full season.
  
  
• Mid January, after the All-American games.
  

Said Huffman: "So let's say we release our pre-evaluation periods rankings in early April and a kid blows up the second week in April, it may not be until the end of may that we rank him.

"We like to use that whole time frame to fully evaluate by position, by region and then nationally."

247Sports.com

JC Shurbutt, National Recruiting Analyst

"We at 247Sports like to rank, with our part of what we do with the 247Sports composite, we like to rank them very quickly, initially, and then we're constantly updating. Whereas other sites have a scheduled update, we're constantly tinkering, re-evaluating, things like that."

247Sports.com produces two sets of rankings: its own inputted by analysts and a composite that averages out the rankings of four major scouting websites.

The rankings that come from the site analysts, Shurbutt said, value film highest. Camps, he said, are the biggest obstacles in covering today's recruiting scene.

"We don't believe in the camp evaluations that go on throughout our industry now," Shurbutt said. "We think camps are a great resource to check things that you see on film and in the actual sport of football, because you can check: Is a guy really 6-5? Is he really 300 pounds? Is he really that fast? That's what's good for camps."

Shurbutt followed up that point with anecdotes about other scouts significantly altering grades based on small sample sizes (i.e. a wide receiver catching only six of eight balls) as well as positional oversights (i.e. a linebacker without pads dropping in coverage well).

However, Shurbutt said the 247Sports.com team does value scholarship offers, as long as they're sure they are committable. He remembers a player with no other offers claiming that he had one from Alabama earlier this year.

Shurbutt reasoned that college coaches could win or lose jobs over recruiting. So while the world of offers has become foggier, it's worth it to navigate.

As far as how those offers factor into star ratings, Shurbutt said one or two offers from major programs don't usually lead to an adjustment.

But when the "who's who" of college football comes knocking, then it's time to look at the film again.

Davante Davis, who decommitted from Syracuse after a flurry of big-time offers on May 29, is a perfect example of this, Shurbutt said. He's likely a four-star recruit, and the offers alone indicate that.

"Davante Davis is absolutely a miss, because Syracuse is an ACC program," Shurbutt said. "They've found talent before. The kid's at a powerhouse school. We shouldn't have just said, 'Syracuse is his only real interest. He's maybe a sleeper.' We should've maybe taken more time on him."

For all of these reasons, and the subjectivity that is inevitable throughout the industry, Shurbutt said the 247Sports.com composite rankings are the most accurate, and most valuable to fans.

The site uses those statistics for its team rankings as well.

"The composite, I think, is the best ranking out there," Shurbutt said. Better than our own, no offense to myself and the others, because it just gives you such a consensus. And if you look at the five-star guys from the 2013 class, all but probably four or five played, and several of them started. So it ended up being a lot more accurate."

This method takes steam out of the "hype train" as Shurbutt put it. Oftentimes there are very few outliers among sites when it comes to ranking players. If a 7-on-7 coach has an in with a regional analyst at one site, the composite will balance that out. And if another analyst dropped a player's rating for one poor performance, the composite will balance that out.

No system is perfect, and there will always be misses, but Shurbutt recommends the composite as the best in the game.

Said Shurbutt: "Composite is what we like to emphasize, because we just feel like that's a better way for fans -- not just hardcore recruiting fans, but the average fan as well -- to kind of consume recruiting content without getting confused, because there are so many people that are involved in this now, the star ratings and stuff."

[AuburnNTexas 7,489]

This was a great read. I can understand the reasoning between why each does it one way or the other. Most use camps to validate things like height, speed, over all athleticism but realize that what the camp presents and what happens on the field during a game are two different things.

I also tend to agree the composite rankings make a lot of sense in that you are seeing how multiple services rank a player. The one thing none of these services do is tell you how a player fits in your schools system. That is why our coaches and coaches at other schools might prefer a 3* or 4* over a 5* As an example on D if you are playing 3 d-linemenn versus 4 D-Linemen you are looking for different things in your DT. One school might need a boat anchor that can't be moved whereas another might need a quicker lighter DT who can make plays in the backfield. In some systems you are looking for WR's who can block downfield and catch in others you just want guys who can get open and catch.

[AURex 2,403]

I also really liked reading this. But in the end, all these ratings and recruiting news services are not really intended for use by coaches. They are primarily just a way to "feed the fans." I don't really pay any attention to the stars. If our coaches are high ona player and want him to play for Auburn, I really don't care how many stars he has. And I really don't care about that mythical "recruiting championship" based on stars awarded by those media services. Our coaches will get the best players they possibly can, and coach them up as berst they can, and provide a playbook and game-day decisions as best they can. That's all we can ask or expect.