and there in lies the fallacy with a graph like this. The graph carries the assumption that recruiting rankings are accurate which we know they are not but the question is how much so? The recruiting rankings are the best tool available but an even better tool would be a review recruiting site which evaluates players after they play out their college careers and places an error rating from their rivals pre-college ratings. Then you could probably have a more accurate talent profile of each program.
It would also be better to use several years of data instead of just this year's sagarin rankings. But it's still remarkably clear that recruiting success (according to Rivals and scout) translates into on-the-field success.
Yeah, it has been proven time and again that recruiting rankings are a direct indicator of success on the field and this graph just goes further to prove that. Look at the bottom left corner for f^ck sakes. They nail it. I guarantee that using multiple years it would be even more accurate.
I don't think anyone ever argues that the typical top 15 and their recruiting classes are wrong. The four and five star high school players get more evaluation and thus they are more accurate evaluations and, frankly, it's easy to pick out the top 250 or so players in the country. The inaccuracies come in the other 85-90% of recruits to teams that aren't perennial top 15 programs. The graph shows resemblance to the line as you would expect but it hardly nails it. There are several outliers on both sides of the line.
The biggest thing that this graph tells me is something I've suspected all along when it comes to recruiting rankings. They rank kids primarily on the "quality" and number of offers and not by evaluating kids unbiasedly and w/o knowledge of who offered them. Look at the teams above the line that are "underachieving." They are almost all BCS programs and/or name programs. The teams "overachieving" shown below the line are almost all mid-majors or BCS programs with smaller football fan bases. Gee, am I suppose to believe that is what is going on or are most kids just being ranked inaccurately?
What I believe happens with the majority(kids outside the top 250 or so) of the talent pool is a kid gets some decent offers and gets a decent rating. Then he gets some more exposure and a bigger offer rolls in. Then his rating gets bumped, then more schools take notice and a couple more bigger schools offer. His rating gets bumped some more and all of the sudden you have another overrated kid going to a name program. On the flip side, you have a kid who lives in the mountains and doesn't get nearly the same exposure who goes to Boise St. or Cincinnati with a two star or low three star rating and is actually about as good as the other kid who is a four star going to Georgia.
What it really comes down to is the recruiting services are in it to make money and they tend to appease the larger schools with bigger fan bases that buy recruiting subscriptions so they inflate their recruits rankings and, low and behold, they end up "underachieving." Therefore, other than the obvious studs in the top 250 or whatever and the top 15 traditional programs, I take the rankings with a grain of salt.
