Thursday, June 14, 2012

Rivals: Ohio pre-season top 60 for 2013

Mike McCray is the #3 player in Ohio, according to Rivals
Last Friday, Rivals released its top 60 prospects in Ohio for the class of 2013.  Normally, I wouldn't care much about what goes on in Ohio, but several Michigan commits are on the list:

3. Mike McCray - LB - Trotwood (OH) Trotwood-Madison
4. Dymonte Thomas - S - Alliance (OH) Marlington
7. Jake Butt - TE - Pickerington (OH) North
11. Taco Charlton - DE - Pickerington (OH) Central
16. Ben Gedeon - LB - Hudson (OH) Hudson
24. DeVeon Smith - RB - Warren (OH) Howland
27. Jaron Dukes - WR - Columbus (OH) Marion Franklin
39. Gareon Conley - CB - Massillon (OH) Washington

By comparison, Ohio State has #1, #2, #5, #9, #12, and #36.

9 comments:

  1. Brogan Roback at #14? He has zero BCS offers. Rivals is so cool with their ballsy predictions. I guess they this he's going to lead a MAC school to the BCS playoffs in 2017.

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    1. I'll say this about quarterbacks: Every school seems to offer the same elite guys at quarterback. When all the Plan A guys are off the board, schools go to Plan B. Quarterback isn't a position where you can bring in 3 or 4 or 5 guys in one class, so teams only offer a few and concentrate on those guys. If you look at a guy like Austin Appleby from last year, he had a bunch of MAC offers early, eventually grabbed a Purdue offer, and committed to the Boilermakers. I wouldn't be surprised to see Roback's recruitment follow the same trajectory. He's not a high FBS prospect, but he could go to a mid-level FBS school like Purdue, Missouri, etc.

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    2. I don't get these sort of gripes about recruiting site rankings being 'wrong'. They're one source of an opinion on something that is hard to predict - it's more interesting if they want to be an outlier than if they just follow everyone else. This is how we can figure out if their evaluations are worth a damn...and some empirical evidence exists that they are.

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  2. I'm a little perplexed by these rankings. If you look at the offers from some of these recruits in comparison to their rankings it doesn't make much sense, but I guess they have to be unique with their rankings to seperate themselves from the other sites.

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    1. If offers meant everything, recruiting sites could just list the players in order of how many schools have offered scholarships.

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  3. Rivals has consistently been the best at ranking recruits. I can understand criticizing individual rankings here or there, because they're not right 100% of the time...but they're better than ESPN, Scout, or 247 Sports.

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  4. How can you say they're better than 24/7? It takes 4-5 years to really tell and 24/7 has been around what? 1-2 years?

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    1. You're right. I meant all the other sites, but the jury's still out on 247.

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    2. I'd say far longer. I'm pretty sure the analyses that say one site is better than another are not conclusive or consistent - and I really doubt they would pass statistical significance thresholds.

      These sites are all in their relative infancy (10 years or so) and their methods are not really consistent, their analysts have changed, etc.

      Nobody has any meaningful factual basis to say one is better than the other. That doesn't mean you can't have your reasons to prefer one over the other.

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