In less than two weeks, every University of Tennessee football fan – wait, scratch that: every major college football fan everywhere – will be hanging on which five-, four- and three-star players sign with which schools in their sport’s first-ever early signing period Dec. 20-22.
And to an extent, you can’t blame them. After all, there’s got to be some correlation between all those No. 1 recruiting classes Alabama coach Nick Saban has signed over the last seven or eight years and the fact that the Crimson Tide is the only program to appear in each of the first four College Football Playoffs, including this season’s.
But if you want to know why rating high school kids isn’t an exact science, you need only to look at Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield, who was presented the 2017 Heisman Trophy on Saturday night.
Rated as a three-star recruit coming out of high school in Austin, Texas, Mayfield had college offers from only Florida Atlantic, Rice, Washington State and New Mexico.
Deciding he wanted more, he first walked on at Texas Tech, became unhappy there despite putting up excellent numbers before a midseason knee injury, then left Lubbock and walked on a second time at Oklahoma, which had been his favorite team as a high schooler.