There’s a good reason why schools chase after five-star recruits. They’re where the best odds lay.
That’s right. A five-star recruit is ten times more likely to become an All-American than the average recruit.
Those Thomas Davis-was-a-tw0-star-recruit stories are nice. And we fret over the Da’Rick Rogers of the world’s choices. But that’s all micro stuff. The macro reality is that the schools that recruit the best talent over time tend to win more over time. All the rest of the recruiting analysis you see is commentary.
Get The Picture 
That table does a nice job correlating recruiting rating with All America probability, but does that really prove enough to support a conclusion about team performance? Lots of All Americans are stars on bad teams.
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My bad. I left a link to another post of Matt Hinton’s out by accident. It’s fixed now and addresses your point.
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Now I say:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Corch will never leave Florida and Mack Brown will die with his burnt orange boots on.
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Surprise! The teams with the best players tend to win. What a revelation.
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Am I the only one who really doesn’t care a whole lot about Da’Rick Rogers?
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Nope.
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Don’t you know the whole future of the UGA program rides on the decision of one 18 year old?
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Ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Now that the WWL is heavy into recruiting reporting they tend to follow closely the 5-star players. Good players on great teams, Texas, Ala, UF tend to make All American while great players on bad teams don’t. With the exception of the GPOOE when was the last time a player on a 9-4 team won the Heisman?
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I’m not positive, but I think the answer is the last time a player threw for 30 tds and ran for another 20 in the same year.
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I also believe that the question, a good one, is as much an indictment of the Heisman voters as anything else. If I had been voting this year, my choices would have been Suh, Gerhart and Berry in that order despite playing on less than championship caliber teams.
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I agree about Da’Rick. Presumably the hysteria about him is attributable to his listing by all the media outlets as our marquee recruit. We are certainly loaded at this position for 2010 and probably 2011 (unless Marlon Brown is a complete bust). I’m personally more worried about the lack of OL recruits.
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You may know this already, but we just picked up another OL today. 6’5″ 300 lb. OT Kenarious Gates decommitted from Kentucky and committed to Georgia.
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+100 on Rogers. If we get him, he needs to sit a year and have someone work on his “tude”. He is a young Kelley Washington so maybe Knoxville is the right place for him. Physically very impressive looking athlete but got two personal fouls on his first two scoring plays this year for showboating in his opening game. I know lots of people really want him, but I am not so sure. Receiver isn’t a need for us next year anyway, I doubt he would play much at all. Suits me to wait until next year and get a top receiver without the ego.
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That last bit . . . Was that Hillel the Elder on College Football?
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Absolutely. The Talmud has some surprising insights about recruiting and the BCS. 😉
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We are starting our 4th disappointing year in the last 5 years now today for this new season with the recruiting class for this year, then the G-Day Game with an unproven unprepared QB for the 3rd time in the 5 years now. We squandered recruits and it has caught up with us, especially on our sorry offense with their penalties, fumbles and interceptions. Now the recruits are making their voices heard today.
This is going to be a very poor recruiting class for UGA. At this point, we are ranked the Number 15 Scout.com and the Number 16 Rivals.com recruiting class in football in the nation, by far the worse recruiting class for UGA. We have added some recent commitments and the recent commitments are just warm bodies with none of the recent commitments impact players and none of the recent commitments the holes we all see so glaringly. We started this recruiting class off right. We need to have some big good surprises today, such as a top running back, a tall fast secondary, a tall fast wide receiver, a great linebacker, and another defensive tackle.
What is going on in our Bulldogs’ Football Program 4 of the 5 now current years ? 3 of the last 4 years have been huge disappointments, and now we start this season like this. The recruits we did not get on offense are an indictment on the coaching staff for Coach Richt’s Offense. It is going to be a long year, and this then makes it 4 of the last 5 years that we will have a long year.
Sad.
We have 7 of our recruit commitments who are not considered very highly at their position, nor even as football athletes in the state they are from. This is a bad recruiting class, and it will be written that it is a bad recruiting class.
It is the worst recruiting class of the Coach Richt Era by a long long long long way.
We are officially in decline, and it is too bad because we will field a very good defense this season and we have the 2 best kickers in the nation on one team. So, where is the problem that 7 scholarships are given to warm bodies and 20 other schools are adding a lot more than we are today with us coming off an 8-5 year in which we lost to Florida again, lost to Tennessee (7-6) again, lost to LSU again, lost to Oklahoma State who even Houston beat, but not us; and for good measure lost to Kentucky (7-6.)
We end the season just over not ranked in the AP Poll and not ranked in the USA Today Coaches’ Poll. We start this 4th year of the last 5 now disappointing years likely as not, unranked, and the first thing everyone is going to say is that you had a unranked team last year 8-5, played in a sorry bowl game in Shreveport, and piled on the dead last worst recruiting class in the Coach Richt Era.
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Sad to be you, but I understand. When I first started to play golf I was elated over over the few good shots I hit and was happy with scores in the low 90s, upper 80s. Then I got my handicap in the 2-4 range and am miserable when I shoot 77, even though I may have had 3-6 birdies….I only remembered the two bad swings that cost me double bogies. All a matter of perspective and focus yet I can’t get past it. Now I am cutting back on golf because it doesn’t make me happy anymore, I burned out. I refuse to let 18-22 year old kids ruin my love for CFB. UGA is doing great, if you expect every season to go perfectly you can find misery. Step back and enjoy. We have a great chance of going to Atlanta this season if we avoid a few key injuries in certain games….that is all it takes.
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Personally, now that the changes to the defensive coaching staff have been made and looking at the talent returning to UGA on both sides of the ball, I am more optimistic about UGA football than I have been in years. Go Dawgs!
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