[washingtonismoney]

I find it odd that you can rate a player so highly when they haven't had a lot of opportunity to demonstrate their ability. Far be it from me to question the recruiting experts, but basing a kid's ranking entirely on "potential" seems odd.

I don't think it's terribly odd. It's what evaluators do in basically every sport.* How good you are at it is another question. In the case of high school quarterbacks, I took kind of a quick glance at various quarterbacks--and quite a few highly-rated quarterbacks have had surprisingly modest high school numbers. And most people who have looked at the numbers find that highly-rated players perform better on average than more modestly-rated ones, and teams with collections of highly-rated players perform better on average than teams with collections of more modestly-rated players.

*(NBA teams routinely take big men who have only played basketball for, like, three years or something, to take one example. NFL teams have been known to try out basketball players with barely any football experience, sometimes with wonderful results at TE--e.g. Antonio Gates and that Saints TE whose name escapes me. And so on. If production were what mattered, Kellen Moore would've been the second pick in the NFL draft.)

[washingtonismoney]

I find it odd that you can rate a player so highly when they haven't had a lot of opportunity to demonstrate their ability. Far be it from me to question the recruiting experts, but basing a kid's ranking entirely on "potential" seems odd.

I don't think it's terribly odd. It's what evaluators do in basically every sport.* How good you are at it is another question. In the case of high school quarterbacks, I took kind of a quick glance at various quarterbacks--and quite a few highly-rated quarterbacks have had surprisingly modest high school numbers. And most people who have looked at the numbers find that highly-rated players perform better on average than more modestly-rated ones, and teams with collections of highly-rated players perform better on average than teams with collections of more modestly-rated players.

*(NBA teams routinely take big men who have only played basketball for, like, three years or something, to take one example. NFL teams have been known to try out basketball players with barely any football experience, sometimes with wonderful results at TE--e.g. Antonio Gates and that Saints TE whose name escapes me. And so on. If production were what mattered, Kellen Moore would've been the second pick in the NFL draft.)