Ohio State recruiting: What positions are hardest to evaluate for college stardom?
Have a question about Ohio State recruiting? This is the place for you, five days a week. Submit your questions on Twitter or on the Lettermen Row forums. Check in daily to see what’s on the mind of Buckeyes fans all over the country. Today’s question is about talent evaluation and what positions are hardest to predict stardom for.
Ohio State Recruiting Question of the Day
It’s Thursday and Day 1 of 27 in a row with college or professional football on TV.
Rejoice and be glad in it, friends.
Today’s Recruiting Question of the Day is a departure from Ohio State-specific information, kind of, but absolutely a departure from the concerns and worries about the state of the Buckeyes 2019 class. Let’s take a bit more of a macro view on the whole recruiting thing, eh?
It has been stated that there is a need for offensive tackles in this cycle. In part due to some previous linemen not panning out. Which makes me wonder, what is the hardest postion to project to the next lvl?
— Jerm (@jerminator06) October 25, 2018
To be very clear, I am not a talent evaluator, though I do think that I, like many former athletes, do have some idea of what a good athlete looks like. There is a certain fluidity, an ease, and a general confidence of motion and movement that the eye is able to behold. That said, when it comes to football, so much of what takes a “good athlete” and moves him into the realm of “good football player” is nuanced and position specific.
The guys out there that can see a kid’s talent and know exactly how it translates to football in the college or professional levels are much more skilled in their evaluations than I could ever hope to be. I did, however, ask someone I trust in the college evaluation business to weigh in on today’s question. Here are his answers and yes, Jerminator, the offensive line evaluations, he says, are the most difficult.
“Offensive linemen,” this college source, said when asked for his thoughts. “Because it’s hard to know how tough kids are. They are the biggest kids on their high school teams.”
Basically, for the Goliaths among the Davids, sometimes you can really gauge the “want to” because physical domination in high school is so easy for most players being recruited at a place like Ohio State. When you get to college, you’re just one of the guys and if you’ve not been mentally tested because you’ve not really been physically pushed to your max, it’s harder to know how you stack up. That’s why generally, I think it’s better to recruit offensive lineman from bigger high schools that play higher-level prep football. You’ve seen those kids against good players of similar size and you have a better idea of what you’re getting.
After the offensive line, this particular talent evaluator said the next most difficult position to project is in the defensive backfield.
“Corners,” he said, adding another position to the list. “Because unless you see them live you don’t have a feeling on their movement skills. Also, a lot of kids don’t play cornerback in high school. They play quarterback, wide receiver and safety, so you have to project.”
Cornerbacks are usually in the conversation for the most athletic guys on your college team, and because of that, those guys usually end up playing positions in high school that allow them to make a great in-game impact. That’s why Ohio State, for example, likes to see talented high school receivers — I’ll use Wisconsin’s Danny Davis and current Purdue commit Mershawn Rice as examples — and try to get those kids to consider the defensive side of the ball. For a lot of in-state players that don’t end up with Buckeyes offers, their unwillingness to consider that option short-circuits their recruitment with Ohio State before it ever truly begins..