Re: 3-Star Football Recruits

quozzel

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May 20, 2018, 2:12 PM

Tiger77 said:

It seems like we're offering several 3-star players lately. What about 4-star and especially 5-star players? We didn't get to be national champions two years ago and have the run we're having by recruiting 3-star players. That's what we used to settle for back in the old days.

3 stars per who?

Clemson coaches make their own evaluations, and I can promise you the evals the coaches make are assuredly NOT the same as the ones the recruiting services make.

One thing recruiting services don't measure - actually, one thing they utterly ignore - is attitude and coachability. You can be the biggest, most felonious, chick-punching scumbag on the planet, with a haze of pot smoke oozing from the earholes of your helmet...but if you've got 5-star physical ability and you show out in camps, you still get rated purely on your physical talent. The recruiting services like to pretend that these young players are basically just like the sims on their Madden consoles, and every player has a numerical rating and will be the same for everyone, under all conditions and circumstances.

The real world doesn't work quite that way.

Does this mean a lot of Underwear Olympics-hero-type players who look great in their Under Armour jerseys wind up rated 5-stars? Yup. It's the old "looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane" trap.

A lot more of these players wind up ruined by the process. Entirely too many nationally-ranked recruits are so used to having coaches kiss their tails for years as high school students, they can't handle actual expectations and accountability once they get to school. And the schools themselves ruin a lot more...once you hand a kid cash, for instance, he's beyond accountability - he knows the rules don't apply to him because you broke the rules to get him to begin with. And oh, yeah, the NCAA is just a phone call away....

And also, Clemson did get where it was going largely off the backs of its 3-star players. Check the roster for that 2015-2016 team that first appeared in the National Title game...yeah, that roster was leavened with a handful of 5-star guys like Deshaun Watson and Mitch Hyatt and Christian Wilkins (though the last two were true freshmen), and there were a few more 4-star guys like Artavis Scott and Mackenzie Alexander, but the bulk of the roster was 3-star dudes...you know, like Wayne Gallman, Jordan Leggett, Taylor Hearn, Jay Guillermo, Cordrea Tankersely...the list went on and on. And oh, yeah, there were some guys who rated lower than that, like TJ Green - who was a 2-star converted WR playing safety - and of course, Hunter Renfrow, who was a no-star converted QB walk-on playing WR. I even remember they pulled Kevin Dodd from Riverside High School...I think he might have wound up a 3-star late in the process owing mostly to courtesy, but I don't think anybody regarded him as more than a 2-star developmental prospect, the kind of guy you get in January because you still have some spots open. Dodd wound up drafted in the second round.

IMHO, Clemson doesn't really excel at the "recruiting" aspect because we don't have a "do whatever it takes to get this specific recruit to commit" mentality like most SEC teams do. We're good recruiters, and Dabo is excellent in the living room because he's so durn personable and he stands for the kind of things parents really get behind.

Where we really differ, IMHO, is in our ability to evaluate the "right kinda guys" and then develop them. There have actually been a lot of articles written in the past about Clemson's exceptional "hit rate" on recruits - we offer fewer players than any school in FBS football - and our ability to develop talent well above our numerical recruiting rankings. The statistical outlier, for years, has been Clemson in terms of production-versus-rankings.

Whatever, anybody who expects Clemson to solely offer 4-and-5-star, nationally-rated guys, has simply not been playing attention. Has our staff ever done things that way?

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cbrumme® said:

We all sound like coots, trying to console ourselves that 3-stars are better by listing 6 players as examples.

Dabo recruits kids that will buy into the culture. So much that separates kids through college is work ethic and belief.

I don't believe 3-stars are "better". Statistically they aren't.

I also believe that talent evaluation by the recruiting services is highly tilted towards physical measureables, and that's the weak point of the evaluation services.

I can tell you firsthand: probably 50%-60% of the kids doing the camp circuit, who are rated 4-or-5 stars, are kids we also do not want. They will have the physical talent, sure. But some of them simply aren't student-athletes. Some of them have real bad attitudes, and have becomes primadonnas because of the amount of attention they've received. Still others are worse than that, and have their hands out. A smaller fraction are even actual criminals, or are so low-character or low-work-ethic they simply aren't going to pan out, probably anywhere.

You wash that 50-60% out in the evaluation process (and we definitely try to), and you're left with a very small pool of obvious 4-and-5-star guys, and unless you're wildly lucky you won't get enough of them to fill a class.

After that, what you've gotta do is: evaluate lesser-known guys. Some of them are developmental prospects, guys who are rawer, guys who either haven't played much football or are going to switch positions for you in college. Some come from smaller schools. Others are guys who may not have the obvious 4-or-5-star physical tools but have serious game...Ryan Carter was a great example, and even Ben Boulware would fit that description. (We didn't offer until Venables arrived; Kevin Steele didn't think Boulware was offer-worthy and at the time Boulware was just a 3-star prospect without a ton of offers.)

If you're sifting 3-stars, you'd better be good at evaluation, and you'd better be good at development, and our staff seems to be very good at both. The statistics don't lie: nobody offers fewer prospects than Clemson, and nobody - not one school in America - has a higher "hit-rate" than Clemson. (Articles have been written about this, google it if you think I'm being "cootish".)

All I'm saying.

3-Star Football Recruits