[smk67]

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This thread is amazing. Billy Beane is so frustrated with the immense difficulty and inherent inaccuracy of projecting high school baseball players that he refocuses his drafts on college players. Even drafts focused on college players (NFL & NBA) its common to see the post draft "winners" turn out to be losers a year later while a bunch of low rated players you never heard of are now studs.

Yet we are to believe a bunch of amateurs selling draft publications have god like powers to predict the college performance levels of 17 year old football players. The question isn't whether these rankings are accurate, the question is, how innaccurate are they? It seems clear that they can easily be off by 70 plus places when a ND team made up of five classes that average a ranking of around 30th produces a team that isn't close to top 100 in performance. This means that this years top rated ND class will end up somewhere between 1st and 70th in actual results.

Don't fool yourself, scouting is an activity rife with inherent and subconscious bias. These scouting services had to have immense respect for Weis before this year, and if Weis liked a guy, subconsciously they would be biased towards viewing the recruit more positively (confirmation bias). After this season that bias will be reduced, or maybe even reversed. Next years class might even be under estimated.

For those who desire to think more clearly about areas where they have innate bias, I recommend reading/watching the latest interview of Warren Buffett by Fox business news. The worlds greatest investor won't look at a companies stock price before he reads it's annual report. He wants to estimate its value, before being influenced by the markets opinion.

A good book on the subject is "Influence" by Cialdini.

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I disagree that the problem is ineptness at rating players, although you are right that top 10 classes don't equate to top 10 finishes (just ask Bob Stoops last year). The problems with any recruit are due to injuries, academic issues, off the field issues, and development. Last year, oklahoma had players in trouble with the law with their starting qb who ended up kicked off the team. I think they even lost their second stringer, AP was hurt as well. End result of injuries and off the field problems - they were not a good football team. Experts do not predict academic and violence problems, although maybe they should?

Secondly, some coaches are better than others at player development. I like to bring up Jim Tressel here for turning AJ Hawk and Nick Mangold (3 star/ 1 star per Scout) into first round NFL draft picks (and starters now). Lloyd Carr has issues turning 5 starts into first day picks...

So scouting services I think separate atheletes well based on speed, strength, and other tangibles. But it will always be up to coaches to look for the intangibles in their recruits and develop them for the college game. I think domers fears CW is not a good developer of talent, because he should have enough talent to field a good team this year. Are domers now citing failures in the recruiting services for their bad results this year?? Does TW own scout.com or something??