It Appears We Need to Have Yet Another Conversation About Recruiting Rankings

I can't believe we have to do this again. But in a never-ending effort to stop the spread of recruiting misinformation — I believe that's the term we're using now — I'll bite once more.

Cooper Kupp, an unheralded recruit who played his college football at Eastern Washington, won Super Bowl MVP last night — and very easily could have been NFL MVP this season, as well. He's an unbelievable player. But for reasons which still elude me, we have to take every opportunity to pretend recruiting doesn't matter and is not a predictor of future success when a non-five-star plays well in the NFL.

Recruiting is almost the only thing that matters in college football and is a tangibly fantastic indicator of talent for players through college and into the NFL. The stats on this are unequivocal.

Four- and five-star players make up 8-10 percent of every recruiting class. The overwhelming majority of players in college football are three-stars and below. So anyone with a brain would expect those numbers to be pretty similar in the NFL, given the volume of players in college which aren't blue-chip recruits.

What you actually find, with just a cursory glance at the numbers, is that four- and five-stars drastically outperform the percentages when it comes to the NFL Draft. In 2020, 44 of the 64 picks in the first two rounds were four- and five-stars. That's 69 percent of the picks from less than 10 percent of the player pool. Last year, 110 of the 259 players selected were blue chip recruits.

Using the numbers from the 2020 NFL Draft, four- and five-star recruits are about 29 times more likely to become first round picks than other college football players. The numbers don't lie.

I truly don't know where this narrative that recruiting rankings don't matter comes from or why it continues to be promulgated, but I will keep writing these blogs and shouting from the rooftops until it stops. You'd have to be a moron to think that no under-recruited players are going to have success in the NFL or that guys won't get better throughout college and into their professional careers.

Again, those guys make up NINETY PERCENT of the available player pool the NFL selects from. Some of them are going to end up being pretty good. But it is undeniable that recruiting rankings do a great job of identifying players with the best chances of having success at the college and professional levels. Trust the science.