College Football Recruiting: How valid is the star rating system?

We found some fascinating research by Statistical Sports Consulting (SSC) regarding the significance of football "recruiting stars," the ratings given by recruiting gurus...

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SSC looked at the Rivals.com rankings from 2002 and 2003 and compared them to the all-conference teams for the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-10, and SEC from 2002-2007. (The Big East was excluded because some of the current members were not members of a BCS conference in 2002 or 2003.) They found the following probabilities of a prospect with a particular star rating being named all-conference at some point in his career...

• 5-stars 33.8%
• 4-stars 20.0%
• 3-stars 11.6%
• 2-stars 7.2%

In other words, despite the existence of "can't miss" prospects who miss badly, in general more stars are better. A 5-star recruit is almost 70% more likely to be named all-conference than a 4-star and makes all-conference at nearly triple the rate of 3-star prospects.

Penn State is doing well in the Class of 2010, with eight 4-stars and two 3-stars.

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