A lot of it is like when analytics started dominating baseball front offices.
You had the Hawk Harrelsons and Harold Reynoldses of the world attacking it as a bunch of nerds that never played the game, so can’t possibly know what they are talking about.
And that’s what you’re seeing today with recruiting rankings.
The people saying Miami should be running the Air Raid or Veer and Shoot for a decade + now, are going to also be the people most willing to buy into validity and correlation/causation element of recruiting class rankings.
The people that were excited by the Dan Enos hire and thought that’s the kind of offense that Miami should be running, and that’s big boy football, are probably going to also be the group that attacks recruiting class rankings.
That’s not a coincidence.
I posted this in January. This is why stars matter.
Playoff era started in 2014.
2016 Clemson - (#9 247 composite , 4 5 stars) over Bama (#1, 17 5 stars)
2019 Clemson (#9, 7 5 stars) over Bama (#1, 11 5 star
2020 LSU (#6, 7 5 stars) over Clemson (#4, 11 5 star
3 out of 9 years. So 1/3 of time of t
considerably less talented (on paper) opponent beat the more talented opponent. 2 of these these Ws were total demolitions of the "better" opponent
And there were "almosts" by considerably less talented tea
2015 Clemson (#13, 4 5 stars) lost 45-40 to Bama (#1, 15 5 star
So nearly half the time (44%)in the playoff era, a team with much less talent than the opponent beat or nearly beat the more talented opponent. 44% - so no, this is not anecdotal.
The key # seems to be 4. That's the minimum number of 5 stars to be competitive. Once you get that number, then coaching can make the difference.