[msqueri]

There is a cyclical aspect to this as well. Rivals used to be the best, then it was 247, and it remains to be seen whether/how dominant On3 becomes. There may be a simple explanation for this: all three were essentially created by the same guy. He goes all in on creating a network of college sports fan sites and then sells them to a major media company. Rinse and repeat. He's been doing it for decades. He sold his first recruiting service, Alliance Sports, to Rival Networks for $3 million in 2000. When Rival Networks went bankrupt, he rebought the assets for $500,000. Then he sold Rivals to Yahoo in 2007 for $98 million. As soon as his non-compete ended he created 247 and then five years later he sold 247 to CBS for what's believed to be upward of $200 million. And now he's launched On3. The smart money is probably on On3 becoming the dominant player within the next five years.

247 gets much more traffic and, presumably, more revenue than Rivals, which leads to more resources. Theoretically that should lead to higher quality and more predictive rankings, though I'm not aware of all that many good comparisons across the services, and any comparisons there are would provide retrospective/lagging insight. For instance, in 2017 people crunched the NFL draft results to find Rivals was the best at predicting first round NFL draft picks, but that tells you something about recruiting rankings circa 2012-2013. A lot changed since then, namely 247 eating Rivals' lunch.

ESPN is completely worthless. If you pay attention to their rankings you'll notice they are a) heavily imbalanced toward players from the Southeast (and I am one who thinks the Southeast is BY FAR better at football than other regions, but there can be no excuse for how many of ESPN's top recruits tend to be from there) and b) heavily biased in favor of players that happen to agree to play in the Under Armour All-America Game, which is televised by ESPN. ESPN runs its recruiting work (can't call it a "service" with a straight face) on the cheap, knowing that its brand dominance generally in sports will get it eyeballs no matter how useless or incredible its insights actually are. And, of course, recruiting is way down the hierarchy of things core to its business, very much unlike 247/Rivals/On3.

I love the idea of a composite, both 247 and On3. For me that's much more meaningful than a single service's (even 247) evaluation. I don't yet have an opinion on whether 247 or On3's composite is better. I will probably trust On3's composite, Recruiting Prediction Machine, and NIL valuations much more several years from now than I do now, as they will presumably learn/adapt as an organization, gain more resources, and plug past data into their machine learning.

I don't share SamuelMcF's dislike of the Rivals scale. While I don't understand why the numbers they pick are in the range they are/capped at 6.1, I think the instinct is very sound to find a way to distinguish between recruits that isn't so overly precise as an exact numerical ranking (what kind of confidence can one have that the #611 prospect is better than the #683 prospect? None) or as blunt and un-nuanced as a star rating. Fans who put a lot of stock in low 4-star rankings and/or ignore the signals sent by high 3-star rankings have some of the most misguided views in recruiting. To me, the Rivals' approach finds a defensible middle ground. As you can see in my three-dimensional analyses, I value the opportunity to pick out comparable recruits in the view of a major recruiting service. That would be a much less valuable exercise if I did so based on 3/4/5 stars and if I tried to come up with my own range of which increments are most comparable for given recruits that would be subjective and require work Rivals' approach makes unnecessary.

I thought Rank By Offers was flawed but I appreciated some attempt to algorithmically compare offer quality. I notice all the time Stanford fans citing an offer from _____ (insert decent football program here, or insert hard-nosed identity program with respect to an OL recruit, or so forth) as if that's supposed to tell us something meaningful about a recruit. That totally ignores how many offers are provisional/not followed through on as committable offers and how much offer proliferation there has been generally. It was nice to have a ranking to try to generally, if imperfectly, compare offer strength. But Rank By Offers has been defunct for five years.

On whether 247 having credibility helps our image, bear in mind that the main rankings 247 uses for individuals and team rankings are the composite, not the 247 rankings. I'm not sure I've noticed one service systematically liking Stanford recruits more/less than the others over multiple years but within individual years there definitely can be a divergence in views on how our recruits are perceived.

[msqueri]

There is a cyclical aspect to this as well. Rivals used to be the best, then it was 247, and it remains to be seen whether/how dominant On3 becomes. There may be a simple explanation for this: all three were essentially created by the same guy. He goes all in on creating a network of college sports fan sites and then sells them to a major media company. Rinse and repeat. He's been doing it for decades. He sold his first recruiting service, Alliance Sports, to Rival Networks for $3 million in 2000. When Rival Networks went bankrupt, he rebought the assets for $500,000. Then he sold Rivals to Yahoo in 2007 for $98 million. As soon as his non-compete ended he created 247 and then five years later he sold 247 to CBS for what's believed to be upward of $200 million. And now he's launched On3. The smart money is probably on On3 becoming the dominant player within the next five years.

247 gets much more traffic and, presumably, more revenue than Rivals, which leads to more resources. Theoretically that should lead to higher quality and more predictive rankings, though I'm not aware of all that many good comparisons across the services, and any comparisons there are would provide retrospective/lagging insight. For instance, in 2017 people crunched the NFL draft results to find Rivals was the best at predicting first round NFL draft picks, but that tells you something about recruiting rankings circa 2012-2013. A lot changed since then, namely 247 eating Rivals' lunch.

ESPN is completely worthless. If you pay attention to their rankings you'll notice they are a) heavily imbalanced toward players from the Southeast (and I am one who thinks the Southeast is BY FAR better at football than other regions, but there can be no excuse for how many of ESPN's top recruits tend to be from there) and b) heavily biased in favor of players that happen to agree to play in the Under Armour All-America Game, which is televised by ESPN. ESPN runs its recruiting work (can't call it a "service" with a straight face) on the cheap, knowing that its brand dominance generally in sports will get it eyeballs no matter how useless or incredible its insights actually are. And, of course, recruiting is way down the hierarchy of things core to its business, very much unlike 247/Rivals/On3.

I love the idea of a composite, both 247 and On3. For me that's much more meaningful than a single service's (even 247) evaluation. I don't yet have an opinion on whether 247 or On3's composite is better. I will probably trust On3's composite, Recruiting Prediction Machine, and NIL valuations much more several years from now than I do now, as they will presumably learn/adapt as an organization, gain more resources, and plug past data into their machine learning.

I don't share SamuelMcF's dislike of the Rivals scale. While I don't understand why the numbers they pick are in the range they are/capped at 6.1, I think the instinct is very sound to find a way to distinguish between recruits that isn't so overly precise as an exact numerical ranking (what kind of confidence can one have that the #611 prospect is better than the #683 prospect? None) or as blunt and un-nuanced as a star rating. Fans who put a lot of stock in low 4-star rankings and/or ignore the signals sent by high 3-star rankings have some of the most misguided views in recruiting. To me, the Rivals' approach finds a defensible middle ground. As you can see in my three-dimensional analyses, I value the opportunity to pick out comparable recruits in the view of a major recruiting service. That would be a much less valuable exercise if I did so based on 3/4/5 stars and if I tried to come up with my own range of which increments are most comparable for given recruits that would be subjective and require work Rivals' approach makes unnecessary.

I thought Rank By Offers was flawed but I appreciated some attempt to algorithmically compare offer quality. I notice all the time Stanford fans citing an offer from _____ (insert decent football program here, or insert hard-nosed identity program with respect to an OL recruit, or so forth) as if that's supposed to tell us something meaningful about a recruit. That totally ignores how many offers are provisional/not followed through on as committable offers and how much offer proliferation there has been generally. It was nice to have a ranking to try to generally, if imperfectly, compare offer strength. But Rank By Offers has been defunct for five years.

On whether 247 having credibility helps our image, bear in mind that the main rankings 247 uses for individuals and team rankings are the composite, not the 247 rankings. I'm not sure I've noticed one service systematically liking Stanford recruits more/less than the others over multiple years but within individual years there definitely can be a divergence in views on how our recruits are perceived.