The Blue Board

Meant to add this link. Tells a little more how Composite rankings are done...

Figured some will probably ask how the industry rank is formulated. I believe it is like this but one of the staff members can correct me if I'm wrong.

industry rank is where they are ranked in the four major recruiting services divided by four (I think). So someone like Reuben Foster is going to have an industry rank of 3.25 meaning 2+2+2+7=13 (ESPN, Scout, Rivals have him as 2nd player. 247Sports has him as 7th) 13/4=3.25. But in the composite rankings that is the 2nd best industry rank still.

Ripped this from Lucky (hope you don't mind...)

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The 247Composite Rating is a proprietary algorithm that compiles prospect "rankings" and "ratings" listed in the public domain by the major media recruiting services. It converts average industry ranks and ratings into a linear composite index capping at 1.0000, which indicates a concensus No. 1 prospect across all services.

The 247Composite Rating is the industry's most comprehensive and unbiased prospect ranking and is also used to generate 247Sports Team Recruiting Rankings.

More details

*** All major media services share an equal percentage in the 247Composite Rating.

*** The composite index equally weights this percentage among the services that participate in a ranking for that specific prospect.

*** A composite strength meter, indicated by red bars, illustrates the total number of industry services that have ranked the prospect. A full strength meter indicates the prospect has been ranked by all industry services participating in the composite.

*** All industry services have a different philosophy on number of "stars" distributed with each class. The 247Composite Rating assigns stars based on an approximate average distribution of stars from the industry.

Check out the following applications:

1. Player Profiles: Check out O.J. Howard's profile page: http://247sports.com/Player/OJ-Howard-12042

2. 247Composite Ranking: Ranks 1000s of prospects: http://247sports.com/Season/2013-Football/CompositeRankings?InstitutionGroup=HighSchool

3. Alabama Commit List: Sorted by the 247Composite: http://alabama.247sports.com/Recruit/Commits/2013/Football

4. 247Composite Team Ranking: Most comprehensive and unbiased team recruiting ranking in the industry: http://247sports.com/Team/Ranking/2013/Football

We will need to update rankings/ratings from other services as they change. Easy to do within the Top 100, but we will be doing it for all recruits.

If you see a recruit with one bar and you know others have ranked/rated him, let us know and we'll get it updated.

Here's what I posted on our team site to try to help explain exactly what the ranking is and why it's so useful.

Just wanted to give you a brief explanation on the 247Composite recruiting rankings.

Basically, the 247Composite is an average of how a recruit is ranked on the major network services. It takes the ratings from each site and combines them through a complex formula to spit out a decimal number between 0-1. A 1.000 means that player is the consensus No. 1 rated prospect on all four sites. The higher that number, the higher the player is ranked in the composite ranking.

Why is it important?

Couple reasons. First, it creates a much, much bigger list of players who are ranked. While each site ranks only a set number of players (a few hundred), the 247Composite uses the unique rating system of each site to catch the players who fall outside of those rankings. This allows us to have a ranking of thousands of players instead of a few hundred.

Second, by taking an average of all the sites, it keeps any one site from having a major positive or negative effect. This helps neutralize any individual bias that may occur on the sites. Also, it gets rid of the arguments of "well, this site says he's ranked a four star but this one has him as a three." With one ranking using ALL criteria available, each prospect is now ranked on the same scale. Most accurate and most useful tool out there.

What recruiting sites rankings are being used to get the composite score?

I would guess 247, ESPN, Scout & Rivals with each piece of the red bar for each

I would think that any newspaper that doesn't have ties to one of the major networks would or at least should use the composite rankings. Why give one sites rankings when you can give all in one...

I see team ranking has moved UM above Bama as well.

Team Ranking uses composite now. The industry says Michigan's class is better than Alabama's at this point.

We'll I suppose this answers it. I was curious if you were entering the other rankings into your database by hand or had created some sort of web crawler.

Sparty, I expect JC (who is on a plane right now) or Lucky to write up something about these two questions (great ones by the way). I don't want to mess up the answers because they can easily be messed up.

Edit: Just saw Kite's post above. This guy get the 247Composite :) Still going to let JC clarify anything later when the piece comes out.

You can always still just look at 247Sports recruit rankings. Composite recruit rankings and team rankings use the other sites.