With a 3-0 start to the season, the football team is sure off to a hot start, actually the hottest start it has had since 2002. The only negative I can see so far is the lack of recruiting class for 2011.
As of Wednesday, the Pack has a total of seven committed recruits, according to both Scout.com and Rivals.com. And out of these seven recruits on Scout.com, none are ranked above a two-star prospect, while Rivals.com is slightly more generous, as it has three of the seven players ranked as three stars.
And with that in mind, many recruiting experts look to this and say that this is a horrendous recruiting class, possibly one of the worst in the NCAA. But I tend to disagree.
Actually, I disagree with the entire recruiting process because it is entirely flawed. The star system is a great way to rank people but hardly is effective and rarely ranks people correctly. And to show you this, lets look at a few examples, beginning with the most important player on the football team, quarterback Russell Wilson.
On both sites Wilson was ranked as a two-star recruit coming out of Collegiate High School in Richmond Va. And according to Scout.com, he was the 67th ranked quarterback. Now in hindsight, I find it a little hard to believe that there are 66 better quarterbacks in the nation than Russell Wilson.
The next example is middle linebacker and star defensive player Nate Irving. Irving was given a two-star ranking from Rivals.com and a three-star ranking from Scout.com. In both cases, Irving was not even ranked as a linebacker. And it is easy to see that he is much, much better than previously thought coming out of high school.
And for every single recruit that is undervalued and overlooked, there are countless players who are ranked four and five-star players who turn out to be huge busts, and one of the biggest that comes to mind is our dear old friend, former quarterback Harrison Beck.
Coming out of Florida, Beck was one of the most highly-ranked and recruited quarterbacks in the 2005 recruiting class. Both sites had Beck ranked as a four-star recruit and Scout had him ranked as the 11th best quarterback in the nation. And that was about as good as it ever got for the former Wolfpack quarterback.
He committed to Nebraska and after just one season as a Cornhusker, decided to transfer to State. And once Beck got on campus, he was supposed to be the savior at the quarterback position, finally giving State its first quarterback since Philip Rivers’ graduation left a hole at the position.
But everything didn’t go as planned. Beck struggled mightily with the Pack, as he threw for only four touchdowns compared to 16 interceptions. Needless to say, Beck was not the player many thought he would be coming out of high school.
For another example, let’s look outside of Raleigh to our friends down Interstate 40. If recruiting was always correct and players performed to the level the stars predicted, Carolina would have a team that could rival the likes of Florida, Texas and Southern Cal. But that is obviously not the truth.
In the past three recruiting seasons, starting in 2007, UNC has had three-five star players and 35 four-star recruits. However, all that has translated into is a 20-18 record, two losses in the Meineke Tire Bowl and an NCAA investigation.
The list goes on and on, but the point is made. Recruiting is no doubt a flawed process and we shouldn’t be putting so much emphasis on it. The class looks very slim right now, but don’t go and press the panic button yet. Yes, it is a lot nicer to see the Pack have commitments from players like true freshman offensive tackle and five-star recruit Robert Crisp, but O’Brien knows what he is doing and I’m he sure will get the job done.
