SEC Football Recruiting: Rankings Are Great but Keep Them in Perspective
Let your refreshing hand rest Vols fans, Tennessee is done for the day barring something unforeseen, which, of course, is remarkably likely considering the history of National Signing Day. Then again, maybe we shouldn’t let our guard down, but I’ve been working the Twitter machines and the phones for close to 7 hours, so I think I’ll go ahead and let myself be surprised.
Now comes the fun part, and by fun I mean speculative and useless. Arbitrary grades will be assigned, winners and losers will be picked, and FANTASY football will be the only kind for the next seven months.
Actual victors will be decided at some point down the road, but they use idiotic methods like scores. To hell with that, it might as well be sabermetrics in the eyes of recruitniks, whose eye for high school talent far exceeds any definitive outcome like wins, losses or even championships (I suppose I should use the term ‘definitive’ loosely in the BCS era.)
For the record, I should admit that I’m an egregious offender of nearly every single criticism I just listed of the recruiting process, but in all fairness I’m a hypocrite and four years is just too damn long. However, I also understand that every insight I have to offer in regards to recruiting is entirely subjective, and by no means definite. That’s why I like it.
I get caught up in the hoopla like a lot of people, and that’s okay, as long as you realize to keep it all in perspective. In essence, everybody either won or lost today, but it won’t be because a Chili’s waiter who moonlights as a Rivals analyst says so, and those results won’t be apparent immediately no matter how bad you’d like them to be.
Over the next three or four years, the prospects we’ll drool over today will mature mentally and physically, and their play on the field will validate or supplant these premature rush to judgments. However, recruiting is too critical a part of college football to ignore it completely until then. So use these prognostications as a guideline of sorts.
The only thing you can truly ascertain from Rivals or Scout or 24/7 is height and weight (and oh by the way, these too are complete farces the majority of the time.)
Feel free to argue the correlation of Rivals rankings to actual national champions, I probably will forget that I ever wrote this and do the same at one point or another. But understand that these correlations could just as easily be attributed to analysts who are more capable of identifying successful college football programs and assigning rankings based on offer lists too.
And I don’t mean that as a knock on anyone who covers recruiting for a living, considering that I also serve as one of these information gatherers from time-to-time. But what I have to offer is only designed to keep you loosely informed, and whereas I decided to use the word ‘definitively’ loosely earlier, I’ll use the word ‘loose’ definitively now.
You love college football, so do I. And because we love college football there is an intrinsic need to follow and understand college football recruiting, or maybe you just have an odd inkling for following man-children. Whatever your reasons, just be sure to take the recruiting process itself with a grain of salt a LOT of salt.
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