Evaluating Recruiting

[NoLongerN]

I was curious to ask if anyone has ever come across any studies on how players are evaluated to first go to a college team and then how high they get drafted in the NFL?

 seems to give out 400 offers per year, so, I am curious to see if there is any research on what a player was ranked out of high school.

As I was watching the NFL draft this year, I was trying to see if we had recruiting any of these top draft picks.  Of our 400 offers each of the past 3-4 years, I'm curious how many of our misses will end up being drafted in the first three rounds.  To me, this would be fascinating to study.  Lots of guys over the past 10 years that we all seemed to lust after [Owa is in my mind], really ended up being very little in college or the NFL.  On the other end, I recall some OT at Northwestern that went in the 1st round of the NFL draft ... and it made me wonder if of our 400 offers we gave him an offer.  It seems like the Iowa's, NW's or Wisky's seem to get a 3 star guy and three years later they can be a 1st round draft pick ... yet, we recruit better players.  I think Wisky now is recruiting better at OT than we are ... but no so with Iowa or NW, if I recall correctly.

I'm thinking that we seem to do a good job of evaluating talent ... but when I check out a recruit that didn't chose us ... it's not like they are necessarily studs.

Any input.

[zeWilbur]

There has been some efforts done, mostly using the star rating based on 247/rivals/etc. So "analysts" select their favorite recruiting service and map that to what happened in the draft. I haven't seen one with a team/offers focus but there are things like a 5-star is 80% likely to make the NFL but 5-stars only make up about 10% of players drafted in a given year. The numbers for a given year also get skewed when players leave early for the draft. From a data perspective it is almost entirely garbage in/garbage out.

[Mavric]

Just now, zeWilbur said:

There has been some efforts done, mostly using the star rating based on 247/rivals/etc. So "analysts" select their favorite recruiting service and map that to what happened in the draft. I haven't seen one with a team/offers focus but there are things like a 5-star is 80% likely to make the NFL but 5-stars only make up about 10% of players drafted in a given year. The numbers for a given year also get skewed when players leave early for the draft. From a data perspective it is almost entirely garbage in/garbage out.

 

Last I saw, 5-stars are only about 50% linkely to make the NFL.

[runningblind]

Every year I see things about the makeup of those drafted and what HS ranking they had, here is 2020's:

 

https://saturdaytradition.com/big-ten-football/breaking-down-the-255-nfl-draft-picks-by-star-recruiting-rankings/

 

Whether NU offered each one or not is a rabbit hole no one has ever gone dowm but it's safe to say they offered a healthy chunk of them.  That is kind of irrelevant as the combination of talent and development is what turns them into NFL picks, so if the same player goes to a different school does he turn out the same? Doubtful. Might have been better, might have been worse. We'll never know.

[NoLongerN]

Thanks for the contributions.