re: ESPN = Best Recruit Rankings

farmer bill told me the best was 247 composite ....... now it’s espin.... like I said which ever ranking to boost your own team is your best ranking Farmer.

Clearly Aggie is the leader

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If you don't think espn is in it to make money, then I can't help you.

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For recruiting? I can guarantee their staff is monumentally smaller than other recruiting services. ESPN tried to do it and it failed miserably. They rate because they're ESPN, but they're not banking on subscriptions and web traffic.

Because they're a multi-billion dollar company.

Lugenbill is goat .class... family man .. articulate . humorous...

Your method of typing

Is hell to read

on mobile

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It's an inexact science but 247 probably bas the best approach at thr moment.

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Most would agree, and normally think ESPN sucks, but were certainly gunna ride the wave for as long as they'd like to keep us at #1

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ESPN tried to be what Rivals and 247 are a few years ago with each team with a sub site, hiring a huge number of people to do recruiting for each team. It didn't work and they were all let go. Most of them working for RIvals or 247 now.

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That's not exactly what happened.

First of all, individual site owners on Rivals, Scout (when they were very good), and 247 have never had any say-so about prospect ratings. Jim Heckman, et al, with Rivals put a committee system in place and it was done on a points system that included Jamie Newberg, Bobby Burton, Scott Kennedy (waste of a committee seat), and others not the least of which was Bernie Kosar.

That system transitioned over into Scout when Shannon Terry bought out Rivals from the banks (before he sold to Yahoo) and Heckman launched Scout which took a major dive when he sold out to Fox Sports and became the CEO of My Space.

Shannon, once he sold to Yahoo and allowed his non-compete to expire, launched 247 with Burton and he hired a lot of ... some of us who had been around, to watch tape and scout games. He also took the Heckman by committee model and incorprated the composite aggregate model as a viable alternative to the single committee/network model in an effort to thwart over-ranking commits based upon individual site subscription numbers which he felt were counter productive and catering to bigger sites while neglecting smaller sites and alienating their subscriber bases.

Rivals was particularly bad about doing that.

When Heckman sold Scout and it began to nose dive ... a lot of publishers bailed and were lured in by ESPN because they made some promises about money and autonomy which they didn't keep.

So while some publishers were still involved in suits brought against Heckman/Scout/Fox, they got entangled into a similar mess with ESPN but were screwed by the ESPN fine print and litigation advantages had by Disney/ABC/ESPN.

That the ESPN publisher model fell apart was not because of bad publishers, it was because they refused to generate enough free content to make the model viable and, via their offices in Connecticut and Charlotte they hamstrung publishers and definitely exhibited some bias in their recruiting rankings.

There is no exact science. It's impossible. But the best metric at the moment is the 247 composite provided they never allow tweaking by individuals claiming to be experts ... which is why they keep their network rankings separate from their composite rankings.

yessir. check out this stat from 247. UGA is ranked #2 behind Bama but has, count'em FIVE 5* committments.

The other top 5 teams Bama(#1-one), ATM(#3-one), Oklahoma(#4-two) and Oregon(#5-zero)only have a COMBINED Four 5*'s.

Another amazing stat from Kirby and his allstar coaching/recruiting staff.

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That is literally all ESPN does. That's why recruits get ratings boosts when they flip. An offer from UGA/Alabama (who both spend millions in analytics) holds sufficiently ore weight than, say, USCe.

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Only problem with your contention is that once Boom finds an unknown prospect and offers, others come rushing-in eith offers including UGA and Bama. Luginbill was just talking about that the other night on the ESPN Recruiting Show.

So, it's not so much about what school offers as it it what coach offers. That's clear to see.

With that understood let's rephrase your claim.

An offer from Saban (including his staff), or Kirby (including his staff), or Dabo (including his staff), or Boom (including his staff), or Jimbo (including his staff), or Taggert (including his staff), or Richt (including staff), (who all have a good eye and are well known evaluators of talent) holds sufficiently more weight than, say, other coaches (and their staffs) who regularly field competitive teams but fail to put tons of players in the draft.

And expounding on that reality vs the long misheld belief that it's all about the schools or the tradition of the programs is thr fact that, in down decades, (like Tennessee and Texas are experiencing at thr moment), offers from a program being led by incompetent recruiters with no eyes for talent mean little to nothing in thr overall scheme of things.

Even further we might agree that, far too often, some programs offer lists are overrated simply because of the shallow vision some networks place upon exactly what you claimed ... that all potentially great players choose to play for past reputations (of the programs) rather than the staffs which will be instructing them in their craft.