We're in that football void between national college signing day and the NFL draft. How many of those high school stars will turn their potential into a pro career?
It's the time of the football year for speculating about potential — while fans of college teams rejoice/mope about their incoming freshman classes after last month's national signing day, NFL obsessives are studying combine results in anticipation of April's draft. But how many of this year's top graduating high school players will be NFL caliber four years from now? With a hat tip to Matt Hinton's annual analysis of recruiting rankings and college success, we compiled a big pile of data on how recruits fared in their efforts to make the pros, tracking all the players ranked by Rivals.com, generally thought of as the most reliable recruiting site, between 2002 and 2009. (Players from later classes aren't yet eligible to play in the league. All FBS players are accounted for in the rankings.) Here's some of what we found.
The Rankings Are, Overall, Reliable. But...
No big surprises here. The chart looks about how you'd expect: a few extremely low- and high-ranked players with a lot of middling prospects in the...middle. And the rankings, taken broadly, perform well — each recruiting tier outperforms those below it. But there's something a little off about the five-stars.
...Five-Star Recruits Aren't That Much Better Than Four-Star Recruits
