Interesting rearview mirror recruiting analysis by CFN

Good recruiting is only shown in hindsight. How much did these players produce while on the field? The thought should not be how does he look coming in.
 
Not sure if you all read this article by EDSBS, but showed Rivals score versus overall wins -- plus looked at 2 teams playing and their Rivals score and the outcome of the game.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Hug-your-friendly-neighborhood-recruiting-rankin?urn=ncaaf%2C137146

ept_sports_ncaaf_experts-470351640-1233024513.jpg


Bottom line: Based on the recruiting rankings of the last five years, the "more talented" team according to the gurus won almost two-thirds of the time in 2008, by a little more than a touchdown per game. Just as importantly, the difference became more obvious as the gap widened, exactly as you'd expect if the rankings are worth anything at all.
There was virtually no difference between teams that recruited within 2,000 points of one another over the preceding five years (or less than 400 points apart per year); as you might expect, the rankings weren't very useful for parsing talent gaps that small with so many other factors in play, and teams that found themselves bunched closely together in the rankings were generally in the same situation when they went head-to-head on the field.
Click to expand...
Interesting read, but I think a lot of EDSBS's reads are interesting.

Edit: Not sure why my image is not showing have around it. It is a workable link though.
 
That does make intuitive sense MD and is along the lines of the argument I've always made. That is, the rankings are seldom "wrong" in the sense that a good class is usually pretty easy to tell. With reasonable coaching better players will produce more wins. The fallacy that people get hung up over is arguing about whether a team should be ranked 22nd or 32nd. The differences are so small at some levels that they are really meaningless. But people get so excited about ranking things that they forget the small differences.

Much like ranking coaches. If you force rank the ACC coaches from 1-12, you get a hierarchy that makes it appear some are significantly better than others. If you compare the top and bottom you may be right, but the true rankings would be more like 1,2, 3a, 3b, 3c, etc. There are no real differences at some level but ranking things distorts that.
 
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