Whether you get your information from live streams, TV shows, Twitter, fax machines or word of mouth, National Signing Day is a day of star gazing.
Just before you picked up or clicked the link to this issue, you probably read about a four-star defensive end flipping his commitment to a rival school or watched a five-star quarterback decide to stay close to home. No names needed — just stars.
For fans and media members, recruiting revolves solely around stars.
We rank classes, project next year’s rankings and even award recruiting national championships based on star values. But what’s the value in a star? Is the difference between the No. 1 and No. 2 offensive guards that significant that they should be on different tiers?
Sometimes yes and sometimes no.
Regardless of whether a player is a five-star or a two-star, he’s still a player. He contributed enough to his high school or junior college team to make recruiting services or coaches notice him. When one of the two notices, the other soon follows.
If the LSU coaching staff or any other sees enough potential in a player, regardless of star rankings, he has the opportunity to be elite in the college or pros. Out of the last five Heisman Trophy winners, only former Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston was a five-star recruit.
But that’s just the most prestigious award. Those highly-recruited five-star players probably fill out the All-American team, right?
Wrong.
On this past season’s AP All-American Team, only four players were five-star recruits on 247sports.com’s composite rankings. By comparison, one player was a two star — Arizona linebacker Scooby Wright — and two were unranked — Utah punter Tom Hackett and TCU linebacker Paul Dawson.
The stars don’t mean players are more NFL-ready than other prospects, either. Of the last seven Super Bowl MVPs, three were before the age of stars, three were three-star recruits and one, Seahawks linebacker Malcolm Smith, was the only four-star of the bunch.
These stars don’t matter, but bringing in as many high-ranked players as possible is crucial to a team’s success.
Southeastern Conference football has enjoyed one of the longest tenures of dominance in sports history over the last decade largely due to recruiting.
From 2012 to 2014, the conference signed 302 players ranked in the ESPN 300, almost 200 more than any other conference. In terms of the famous five-star recruits, 21 belong to the SEC while the rest of the conferences have brought in 16 combined.
Of the last three season’s top five recruiting classes on ESPN.com, the SEC has 10 of the top 15 classes, with all three No. 1 classes belonging Alabama. In addition, Alabama had nine more ESPN 300 players on its roster last year than any other team. It’s proof that what’s important is the quantity of higher ranked players, not just a handful of highly touted prospects.
The stars don’t matter. The difference between recruit No. 35 and No. 36 isn’t as vast as the difference between a five-star and a four-star sounds.
When the recruit’s name and star count appear on your Twitter feed or fax machine today, support them. Thank them for picking your team.
Most importantly, hope they put in as much time at developing what they do as those two and three-star All-Americans.
Brian Pellerin is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Kenner, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @Pellerin_TDR.