The Blue Board

I posted this on our new Virginia Tech site and figured I would drop it here. For those that have questions generally about our player rankings, here's an in-depth explanation.

Frequency

Our rankings are different than others in the sense that they constantly act as a "big board" of sorts with prospects moving up and down frequently. There is no standard "release" time for an update as we let the discovery process dictate that. We also do not set a pre-determined number of prospects to rank in states and at positions nationally- we simply rank as many as we can.

Already for the Class of 2013, we have ranked a significant number of prospects.

http://247sports.com/Recruit/Rankings

Grading Scale

At 247Sports, each recruit that we evaluate will be assigned a numerical rating as well as a star rating. The rankings are determined by our recruiting analysts after hours of personal observations, film evaluation and input from our network and other reliable sources of information.

Players are ranked by position, grouped qualitatively with a star ranking and given a numerical ranking based on their future potential. The explanation for the numerical rankings is below.

110 - 101 = A player ranked in this range is a "franchise player." He is one of the best to come along in years - if not decades (LeBron James, Adrian Peterson). Odds of having a player in this category every year is slim. This prospect has “can’t miss” talent.

100 - 98 = Five-star prospect. One of the top 25 or so prospects in the nation. Player has excellent pro potential, and should emerge as one of the best players in the country before his college career ends

97 - 90 = Four-star prospect. Prospect will be an impact-player for his college team. All-America candidate who displays pro potential. Typically one of the top 300 players in the nation.

89 - 80 = Three-star prospect. These are the players who will develop into reliable starters for the college teams. They are among the best players in their region of the country, and are generally among the top 750 players in the nation.

79 - below = Two-star prospect. These players make up the bulk of Division I rosters. They may have little pro potential, are likely to become role players for their respective schools or not enough is known about the prospect to rank them accurately.

Philosophy

Our philosophy, to account for the accelerated recruiting process, is to rank prospects earlier in their high school careers than what has been previously done in this business. Because a player can develop dramatically or not in a 2-3 year period in the sport of football, that’s going to make for greater movement in the rankings.

So it’s not out of the question that a player is No. 8 to begin with and finishes at No. 90 or he’s No. 187 and finishes No. 12. The delta for the player’s final ranking (which is what matters and what we should be judged on in that regard) is much wider during a 24-36 month period than an 8-12 month period.

Think of it (and I use this comparison often) as an NFL Draft “big board”. Two years out, a player may be projected as a top five pick, but when all is said and done, after seasons on the field, combines and pro days, other types of evaluations, etc., he may slip to the third round or so.

I certainly am not saying that we are justified if we have a kid start out as a five star with a rating of 102 and end up as a two star with a rating of 75. That’s drastic and inconsistent. But we’ve found that it’s human nature for fans to look at a 30-40 spot drop in rankings and wonder what their favorite prospect going to their school “did wrong” or why we “don’t think he’s good”. Well, the drop doesn’t mean either, it just means when we re-adjusted everything, including the rankings of other prospects, said prospect fell to that particular point in the rankings.

Rankings are fun for you guys to debate, celebrate, complain about, etc., and they are fun for us to put together. That’s why we are going to push the envelope and get rankings out earlier- so you guys can enjoy them and learn about the prospects at an earlier date- so on a day like today- a junior day- you can really dig in and get a true sense of what is going on inside your favorite football program.

Team Rankings

Team rankings are determined by a numerical formula. You can access the formula on the team rankings page linked below and clicking the (i) button at the top of the page.

http://247sports.com/Team/Ranking

Explanation

Each recruit is weighted in the rankings according to a Gaussian distribution formula (a bell curve), where a team's best recruit is worth the most points. You can think of a team's point score as being the sum of ratings of all the team's commits where the best recruit is worth 100% of his rating value, the second best recruit is worth nearly 100% of his rating value, down to the last recruit who is worth a small fraction of his rating value. This formula ensures that all commits contribute at least some value to the team's score without heavily rewarding teams that have several more commitments than others.

Readers familiar with the Gaussian distribution formula will note that we used the value 6 for σ because this was the standard deviation for total number of commits between schools as they were ranked during the 2011 recruitment year, the year this formula was developed. This standard deviation creates a bell curve with an inflection point near the average number of players recruited per team.