I don't mean to knock the recruiting services. They try hard, and they have to evaluate a lot of players. Clearly their focus has a much higher priority on the 5 and 4 star players than the 2 star players. I happened to be looking at the recruiting rankings from last year's class. It seems to be a very good class, and of the 20 that enrolled, 7 of them have already been impact players (Basham, Sayles, McLeod, Wood, Stewart, Tautuaiki, and Mangen). Did the recruiting services consider those 7 to be our best recruits? Hardly. In fact, they were almost all rated as some of the lowest ranked recruits in the class.

247Sports:
Their ratings were remarkably off. Of the six players at the bottom of the class, they managed to hit 4 of the seven impact players (Basham 70, McLeod 70, Wood 72, Mangen 73). Sayles 76 and Tautuaki 77 were middle of the class, while they stuck Stewart in the 2012 class, and listed him at 73, again on the low side.

Scout.com
They are a little harder since pretty much everyone is 2 stars.except Leon Alexander and Tate Leavitt. Ten of the recruits they considered good enough to rank them nationally. Of those, 2 didn't enroll (Graves, Leavitt), and of the remaining eight, 25% of them have played (Mangen, Wood). Of the 12 players not considered good enough to be ranked nationally, 42% have played (Sayles, McLeod, Tautuaiki, Basham, and Stewart).

Rivals
Rivals did a bit better than the first two. They are only slightly upside down, and mostly just have the impact players randomly scattered through the rankings.Of the 7 players they rank at the bottom (5.2), three (43%) have been impact players (Mangen, McLeod, Stewart). Excluding Graves, one of the three players at 5.3 (33%) has played (Tautuaiki). Excluding Leavitt, of the nine players at 5.4, three of them (33%) have been impact players (Wood, Sayles, Basham).

ESPN
ESPN ratings are useless for Ohio recruits. They almost never even evaluate any Ohio recruits. Maybe in the end that's really the most honest rating of all - admitting they don't really know anything at all about them.

Every time I look at this subject, I reach the same conclusion - the accuracy of the recruiting services at the 2-3 star level is not very high. There are simply far too many of them for the services to be accurate in rating them. While I agree that Ohio needs "3-star recruits", it seems like Ohio really may be getting 3-star recruits, but the services are missing them, or mis-rating them. I think most people here would agree that they are happy to have guys like Basham, Sayles, Mangen, Wood and Stewart, and most would agree that they really should have been rated as 3-star recruits (or better).

For me, then the key remains - If Ohio is getting the players they want, that's a good thing. When I see a class like the last two years, where the vast majority of the class is made of from the initial offers (the coach's first choices), then I can be confident it is going to be a very good class, and I feel that way regardless of whether the services give them 2 or 3 stars.

I'm not sure that the fact that a player plays in his first year means that somehow they're a 3 star player. We were almost completely wiped out, depth-wise, along the defensive line and tight end. We put in new guys we recruited, not sure we had any choice. Basham and Sayles seem to be doing okay, don't know about the other guys.

Yes, there were injuries that are reasons why some are playing, but note that they aren't the only ones at the position.
McLeod - Is currently starting, putting him ahead of guys like Tony Davis, Andrew Bennett, and Brandon Purdum
Basham and Laseak - have been playing a lot/starting, but while DE is thin, there are others, like Nic Barber, Eric Price (a 3-Star recruit from 2011), and Trent Smart at DE.
Mangen - Yes, he's playing because of injury, but note that if the recruiting rankings are accurate, it would be Mason Morgan playing, since they ranked him much higher (247Sports 80 versus 73, Rivals 5.4 versus 5.2, Scout 95 National Rank versus 124).
Stewart - There is plenty of depth there at Safety
Watson, Gibbons, Wood - Yes, they would not be playing but for injuries, but...they have played well, much better than you'd expect, and much better than some of this year's Senior starters had when they were Freshmen. For example, Watson's grades at RT are not nearly as good as McGrath's are today, but are better than McGrath's were as a Freshman. Similarly Wood and Gibbons both grade out at RG comparable to or better than Eric Herman did as a Freshman.

I'm not saying that this analysis is perfect, and maybe some of these guys are just being used now, and will not continue to develop into stars. This is just one more look at recruiting, and one more way to try to determine the validity of the recruiting services. The point is that no matter how many times I look at it, or what data I look at, I never find much, if any, correlation. For those that think that the ratings have substantial merit, what do they base that conclusion on?

I would agree that nationwide, for all the services, 3-Star recruits on average are better than 2-Star recruits. When you start looking at the subset of recruits that have 2-Stars, but accept offers from Ohio, and the group with 3-stars but who accept offers from Ohio, there doesn't seem to be a discernible difference. Why not? My assumption is that Ohio Is cherry-picking the best of the 2-Star recruits, and that Ohio is only able to land the worst of the 3-star recruits.

I would add this note - Every single player that has been drafted from Ohio under Solich played as a true freshman. Obviously the reverse is not true, though. Still, given that perhaps 1/4 of the players that have played as true freshmen have been drafted, it has to be a positive sign of their ultimate potential.

I think that anytime a player does play as a true freshman, it's an early indication that he has some ability. On the other hand, just because they do redshirt, I agree that it isn't a sign than they don't have ability. The better the depth situation, the more kids they can redshirt, and I'd rather have an impact player as a 5th year Senior rather than as a true freshman.

The point I was trying to make is that I don't see much correlation between the recruiting rankings and what we get. I think it is significant that no one has tried to make the reverse case - that the recruiting rankings are a good predictor of how they will turn out.

This makes me think two things: