L.C., confusion reigns! I thought your feeling was that 247 was the "best" of the recruiting sites. And they have us #7 MAC and in the 100s. Is OUr recruiting this year really that bad?
Indeed confusion reigns. Increasingly I am forced to come to the conclusion that even the "best" of the sites is still bad. The problems are:
1. They don't rate all the players - There are an awful lot of prospects out there, and they can't possibly rate everyone. I get that. They rate the best, or try to, meaning that they have the best coverage for the top teams, but as you get down to the bottom teams, you lose accuracy because of unrated players. It is probably inevitable. The one solution would be if, after the fact, they actually attempted to rate each player. Instead, come signing day if they haven't rated player, all the sites do the same thing, they give the player the lowest rating possible, and then forget it, and move on.
2. They use cryptic rating systems - it is hard sometimes to get from their ratings of individual players to their rating for the team. Sometimes they just don't make sense. Worse, volume of recruits is at least as important as quality. Thus, since Ohio's class next year will be small, you know Ohio will have a bad rating even if all the players they recruit are very, very good.
3. At the top there is a lot of separation, but as you get lower down the ratings, all the teams get very close together, so there is little to separate one team from the next. Taking 247 as an example, the difference between #1 Alabama and the #2 team is 22 points. Ohio is ranked 105 with 102 points. 22 points less would put Ohio in 125th place. 22 points more and Ohio would be in 82d place.
4. Even when they have the rating, can they connect it to the player? Rivals has a nice 3-star rating for McCray, but they seem to think Ohio signed someone named McCrary, who must, obviously, be a minimum rating player, as they never heard of him.
Combine all these factors together, and you end up scratching your head and wondering why we even go to these sites. Consider that in the last 2 days of ratings, Ohio bounced from 5th to 2d to 7th in the MAC. That isn't exactly a stable ratings system. What caused the drop from 2d to 7th, by the way, was the loss of 2 players from the recruit list. One was Murray, and I'll give them that. The other was Royster, who actually isn't lost at all, but is a preferred walkon. Then, when Ohio added lots of other players, they were all ones 247 didn't know.
Continuing to pick on 247Sports (actually one of the best sites), if they don't know a recruit, during the season they try to rate that recruit, but if it is signing day, they do the same as all the other websites - give them a minimum rating automatically, which means that the team gets no points at all for them, whereas higher rated players are worth many points. I can see that a team gets no points at all for a minimum rated player, while a 2-star player might be worth 4 points, and a 3-star player worth 6-8 points, I think. The players that 247Sports has rated as worthless to the Ohio class happen to be:
Maleek Irons
Papi White
Mitch Bonnstetter
Check Washington
Kylan Nelson
Bretty Layton
If Ohio had not been able to sign any of these players, 247Sports would not have changed their team rating at all. Now, it just so happens that I have watched the video on all these players, and I happen to think some of those are very, very good, and none are horrible. Giving 247 some credit, without these players, perhaps 7th is where Ohio might have belonged. With them? 7th isn't even close, in my opinion. Note that if they all were rated a middle 2-star rating so that Ohio got 4 points each for them, that would be 24 more points, and Ohio would be back to 2d in the MAC and 80th or so overall. If a couple were 3-star players, Ohio would be higher than that.
Sigh.... In the end it seems like just a waste of time even looking at these ratings.