Five-star recruiting debate: What matters when it comes to ranking top prospects

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Andrew Ivins, the director of scouting at 247Sports, was enjoying a margarita by the pool — on one of those rare Saturday afternoons that he wasn’t at a combine or a 7-on-7 tournament — when his phone rang.

A former national coach of the year was calling to find out why one of the high school seniors he’d just signed had slipped down the industry’s composite rankings.

“Turns out we didn’t even move him down. It was some other service,” said Ivins, a recruiting reporter and analyst since 2016 who recently became 247Sports’ first scouting director since Barton Simmons left to become Vanderbilt’s general manager in 2021.

“I haven’t personally spoken to a ton of head coaches, but I know other guys on our team have,” Ivins said. “I’ll say this: All those (coaches) love to get up on signing day and say that the rankings don’t matter. But it matters to them. When it comes to crunch time, they’re gonna make some phone calls and try to get their guys moved up. There’s no doubt about that.”

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Ranking more than 3,000 high school players per recruiting cycle can be a mind-numbing process, but what Ivins and his fellow analysts spend the most time debating is which 32 high school seniors earn the coveted five-star distinction. They’ll put the finishing touches on their 2023 signing class on Thursday.

“When you look at some of the guys in consideration, these are guys we’ve been tracking since they were in eighth grade. And you have a ton of different data points — meaning we saw them in a camp setting, a tournament or one of their games, including these all-star games,” Ivins said.

“Our rankings — we’ve always used the NFL Draft as our compass. At the end of the day, we’re judged the hardest on that Thursday night in late April or early May, when fans bring up kids’ old ranking profiles on draft night. If we say a kid is a four-star, we’re saying he’s an NFL Draft pick. If we say he’s a five-star, we think he’s a first-rounder. Obviously that’s a difficult thing to project, but we study the NFL Draft, lean on trends and try to apply it to the rankings process.”

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The big debate Ivins and his staff are having at the 11th hour is how many running backs to include among their top 32 when it’s obvious the position has become devalued at the NFL Draft. Texas’ Bijan Robinson, Ivins said, is the only running back being projected in the first round, and he’s likely going anywhere from No. 18 to 28.

“We like the running back class and the guys we have at the top,” Ivins said. “I don’t think we favor one guy more than the other. It’s kind of your taste … flavor. So, it’s like, ‘Do we even have a running back who is a five-star?’ If we said that 10 years ago, people would think we’re crazy. But we’re trying to mirror what the executives and what the trends are at the next level. We’re always studying that. That kind of shakes our rankings if that makes sense. That’s year-round, really.”

In the end, Ivins and others make their evaluations without the advantage the NFL gets: seeing them play in college, going through a pro combine and then meeting with them following a private workout.

“One of my favorite parts of the job is if a guy slips through the cracks, even prior to my time, I’m always going back and watching that kid’s film, digging into old track times, trying to figure out how he fell through so we can catch that guy next time,” Ivins said. “Any evaluator who says they’re going to bat 1,000 is completely wrong. You’re going to have misses. You just try to limit those misses.”

The toughest positions to hit on consistently? Linebacker, quarterback and offensive tackle.

“I do think linebacker has been a fascinating position,” Ivins said. “If you look at where the game has gone — and I mean the big boys on Sunday — everybody wants to throw it around the yard. The trendy thing has been these off-ball linebackers. A lot of the guys that have gone early in the draft played a lot of snaps but are on the smaller size. But they were all fast and had verified speed markers. So, we tried to reflect that in our rankings. This 2023 class, we’re probably going to have three kids finish as five stars. One of the kids ran 23 mph in Catapult’s GPS in pads, which is insane. You’re telling me a 213-pound linebacker was the fastest? There’s another kid out of Mississippi, Suntarine Perkins, playing slot corner, running around.

“But at the same time, you’ve got to be careful because there’s a growing theory the game might slip back to more of a power run game and you might need more mashers and big bodies to get in there.”

Of the 11 five-star quarterbacks from 2016 through 2019 to enter college ball, five have been drafted, including three in the first round after just three years: Trevor Lawrence, Justin Fields and Tua Tagovailoa. Eleven of the 22 five-star QBs since 2016 have transferred at least once.

“I’m a big believer in you never really know what you’re going to get until the bullets start flying,” Ivins said. “Sometimes the kids they’ll be in high school, be in a perfect situation, get to the next level, face some adversity for the first time and things don’t go well. Between the ears, it’s not all there.”

Ivins said evaluating offensive tackles is hard because many who end up being drafted were “under 250 pounds when they were in high school.”

Of the 23 offensive linemen to earn a five-star ranking in the composite from 2016 through 2019, 14 have been drafted, with six selected as first-rounders: Jonah Williams (Alabama), Alex Leatherwood (Alabama), Isaiah Wilson (Georgia), Evan Neal (Alabama), Kenyon Green (Texas A&M) and Charles Cross (Mississippi State).

“We’re now ranking kids as freshmen and sophomores,” Ivins said. “The reality is we wish we had more time to kind of identify body types because it’s super hard to project. I’ve been to the eighth-grade All-America game for the past three years in a row. How do you know what this kid is going to look like not only in four years but in eight years? There’s no exact science to that.”

Ivins said he and the 247 staffers speak to college coaches about rankings, but it’s usually just an exchange of information.

“Some recruiting departments are fine-tuned, well-oiled machines,” Ivins said. “Georgia has like 20 staffers in their recruiting department who all have a computer. Other schools don’t have that luxury. With us, you can hear the college feedback. That’s going to be on our minds, but that’s not the end-all-be-all. On our team, we’ve had multiple guys work on the other side, run recruiting departments for Power 5, big schools. We put in the work as well. We get more live exposure to some of these kids than a lot of those schools do. We take what they say into consideration, but it’s a small piece.

“At the end of the day, we watch the kids all around the country and try to stack the top 247 of them. At some schools, they might not be recruiting a kid from a certain region. For us, all those kids are on the board. People always ask, ‘How is this kid not a five-star?’ I tell them, ‘Take the blinders off. This is all you’ve seen. Look at the whole picture. It’s completely different.’ Our process is data-driven as well. Whether that’s testing, measurements, length, all of it is taken into consideration.”

At The Athletic, we have always used composite player and team rankings from 247Sports, which combine the rankings done by ESPN, On3, Rivals and 247.

While Ivins and his fellow analysts are trying to project NFL first-round picks from the high school level, college football fans always have high expectations for five-star recruits. Not all of them become stars as soon as they set foot on campus. Some don’t ever take that step.

Of the 223 five-star recruits in the 247Sports Composite to play in college since 2016, only 11 started every game as a true freshman.

In all, roughly 43 percent of the five-stars since 2016 have started at least one game as a true freshman with one in five starting more than six games in their first college season. By Year 2, 78 percent have cracked the starting lineup and 52 percent are starting at least half of their team’s games.

How many actually need only three years to make the quick jump to the NFL?

Since 2016, 68 of a possible 154 (44 percent) have entered their name into the draft early, including 21 of 32 from the Class of 2020, which won’t be drafted until the final week of April this year. From 2016 through 2019, nearly half of the five-star recruits who entered the draft early (23 of 47) were taken in the first round, with 44 of the 47 being drafted.

How many five-stars have ended up in the transfer portal? Counting the 2022 class, a little more than one-quarter (26 percent) of the 223 five-star recruits since 2016 have changed schools at least once.

How does the 2022 crop of five-star phenoms compare to their recent predecessors after their first season in college? Not bad.

Fifteen out of the 34 five-star recruits in the 2022 cycle started games as true freshmen, with eight starting six games or more (Jackson State cornerback Travis Hunter, Missouri wide receiver Luther Burden, LSU linebacker Harold Perkins, Texas A&M defensive lineman Shemar Stewart, Texas A&M wide receiver Evan Stewart, Georgia safety Malaki Starks, Penn State running back Nick Singleton and Texas offensive tackle Kelvin Banks Jr.).

Four of the 34 have entered the transfer portal.

Tomorrow, in Part 2 of this story, we will detail how the 34 five-star prospects in the Class of 2022 fared as true freshmen this past fall.

(Photo of Bo Nix: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)