AssEndDawg said:
you think repeating something that has already been explained makes it true? No one listens to Rivals when it comes to football. Any reasonable person who understands football knows our class is way better, including Ole Miss fans which is why they are upset.
That really depends on which fanbase you're talking to, how they did in a particular year according to which sites and how their rivals did in comparison to them.
I've seen fanbases claim Rivals is the end all/be all in recruiting coverage. I've heard people claim Scout. I've even heard people claim ESPN (usually only when it's the ONLY favorable ranking they have).
The common thread I've seen is that usually fans believe the best site is the site that ranks their team the highest, or their rival the lowest. It's just a case of confirmation bias. What's reality? Who knows? Maybe someone should do a study on it.
I remember I think in 2009 the Arkansas fans were claiming how Rivals was the best by far. Not coincidentally, they were ranked about 10 spots higher by Rivals than Scout.
The only part that interests me as a stats guy is how they rank classes. Scout assigns a point value to every recruit. They simply add up the highest 25 rated players in your signing class. If you undersign like we did this year, or like other teams have done when they're up against the 85, then your class is ranked lower than it would've been with a full 25, simply because you're effectively taking zeros for how many players below 25 you sign.
Rivals takes your Top 20 recruits. I believe they have point values too, but they also factor in your average star ranking and maybe another factor or two. I don't know all the details, but that's why Scout's rankings tend to favor teams who sign 25+, and Rivals tends to be more favorable to teams that sign fewer than 25.
ETA: I like to judge our classes not on rankings or stars but on how we did with the players we pursued from the beginning. That's a little tougher to judge on a transition class, but even with that, we missed on a lot of guys we were pursuing heavily. I understand why that happened given the season we just had and the coaching change, but it wasn't a strong class and definitely not a deep one. Hopefully we'll have a handful of high quality players come out of the class and the rest will at least provide us some depth. That's about all I want from a transition class.
