By Michael Casagrande
Correspondent
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The ink was barely dry on the 2010 signing class when Alabama football coach Nick Saban stepped to the podium last February.
His pre-emptive strike was planned well in advance. He wasn’t waiting to face a single question about the strength of his latest recruiting class at the signing day news conference.
It was too early, Saban said, to claim victory or defeat with the 18 players who faxed their futures to Tuscaloosa that Wednesday morning.
Champions simply aren’t crowned by adding up stars on a website.
“Every year I try to come up with some analogy to sort of put in perspective how you should rate recruiting classes,” Saban said that afternoon. “If we went out to buy a hunting dog and it was a puppy, we would buy it based on its potential, its lineage or whatever you want to call it in terms of breeding, and we would know probably when that dog grew up whether it was a good hunting dog or not. We’d never know until we put him out in the field and saw him actually go hunting, but we would buy it without knowing for sure what that result would be.
“I think recruiting is not an exact science and really it takes about two years to really evaluate whether you had a good recruiting class or not.”
Scott Kennedy, the national director of scouting for Scout.com, agrees about the difficulty of appraising the quality of recruiting classes. In fact, he said he’s never done it in the nine-plus years he’s worked in the business full time.
Using Saban’s model of grading out two years after players sign, teams that topped the national recruiting rankings had mixed results by the time the recruits finished junior seasons. That’s using the past five seasons and the team recruiting rankings from Scout and Rivals from two years prior.
Rivals had 56 percent of those viewed as top 10 in the recruiting rankings finish in the Top 25 of the final Associated Press poll two years later, while Scout’s rankings had a 52 percent success rate. Both were most accurate with the 2004 signing class that had eight of 0 teams finishing in the Top 25 in 2006.
How the 2008 recruiting class figured into the 2010 AP poll proved the least accurate in the five-year window. Rivals had four of 10, while Scout was 3-for-10.
In that five-year span, seven coaches were either fired or forced out of jobs two years after landing a top-10 recruiting class, including Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville and Tennessee’s Phillip Fulmer.
If forced to double-check his work, Kennedy said he’d look more at how the individual players succeeded in college.
Ideally, he said, a five-star player would turn into an All-American and/or would be a first-day pick in the NFL draft. For a four-star player, landing on an all-conference team would be optimal, followed by hearing his name called at the draft. Those who received three stars should turn into regular contributors, while a two-star prospect would be more of a “blue-collar role player,” Kennedy said.
Of the 28 players named consensus All-Americans this past season, only two were five-star prospects as high school seniors in Scout’s assessment and four earned just two-star ratings. The average 2010 All-American entered college with 3.2 Scout stars next to his name.
The first round of last April’s NFL draft included six former five-star players and five two-star players with an average of 4.1 stars.
Of the four Alabama players who were Scout five-star prospects coming out of high school from 2005 to ’09, Andre Smith, Julio Jones and Mark Barron were All-Americans and Smith was a top-10 draft pick.
How the general public perceives the ratings can be a whole different story. Kennedy said readers often over-emphasize the star-ratings, attaching their own meanings while the true definitions get skewed.
“Unfortunately, fans have their own way of looking at stars, and they kind of think of five-star guys as good players on their team, four-star guys as starters, three-star guys as guys they shouldn’t even be recruiting,” Kennedy said.
Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy was one of those three-star guys coming out of Southlake Carroll High School in suburban Dallas in 2006. He wasn’t a starter there until his senior year, when he piled up big numbers in Carroll’s spread offense.
“I came in trying to prove to people that, yeah, I might have been the second option to Tim Tebow, but I’m going to make every one of my snaps here worthwhile,” said McElroy, a two-year starter. “I was able to do that, and I think that’s just what a lot of three-star or the lesser-recruited guys do.”
In his five years in Tuscaloosa, McElroy set school records for single-season passing yardage and touchdowns. He also witnessed the recruiting phenomenon explode and how it contributed to inflated egos among freshmen.
“The one thing I will say about the three-star guys, they don’t have that sense of entitlement that a lot of recruits tend to have,” he said. “Recruiting has really changed. My year was really the first year — maybe the year before my year — when it really started to pick up and recruits became household names. I think it’s hard for an 18-year-old to juggle that, so they come in with this sense of entitlement.”
Contact Michael Casagrande at sports@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6273.