Hot Take of the Day: Recruiting Rankings Are Too Political

Welcome back to PFB’s Hot Take of the Day, I’ll be your host today.

This is day two of our experiment (if you missed yesterday, it was on Monopoly.) Today, I’m here to lecture — er, gripe — about recruiting rankings (I know my niche audience).

Here’s the deal about recruiting rankings: they matter.

Here’s also the deal: they are wildly political. Too political. (This take might actually be completely frozen in time. Gundy is almost certainly nodding his head in agreement, but whatever. It needs to be said.)

What does that mean? Why does it matter? Why, if they’re so political, should they be taken seriously at all?

All valid questions I will try to address. I won’t go into why they matter or why they should be taken seriously (I’ll spare you 5,000 words for another day), but I will hit you with the nook and cranny of the politics. And it’s this: rankings are run by regional scouts (mostly). Here’s the road map to how it gets political in a hurry:

1. Scout goes to see player

2. Scout talks with coach at school, who informs scout that they’re recruiting player

3. Scout tries to get information from coach on player or players, visits, etc.

That doesn’t seem too buddy-buddy, right? But it is. It’s not corrupt, but it does have an I’ll scratch my back if you scratch yours dynamic. Those scouts/reporters often rely heavily on coaches to provide them with information. If a player commits to Texas, for instance, and that player is ranked as a two-star by 247Sports, it brings the team ranking down and generally looks like Texas stinks at recruiting. It’s (among the many) reasons why Texas always recruits like a top-five school but wins like it belongs in the middle tier of the Ivy League.

It’s a circuitous cycle that never ends.

There is no simple fix. The band-aid is a permanent one: don’t put too much stock into recruiting rankings. And yet all the data shows that, despite the politics, rankings matter quite a bit.

Unfortunately, as the PFB czar of crootin’, I’ve got no simple proposition to fix this dynamic. But I do find it important to bring up frequently in my coverage. Considering how much behind-the-scenes back scratching takes place between scouts/reporters and coaches, I do find it to be an important grain of salt to keep stashed away when looking through the lens of recruiting.