Harrison-Hunte Update

[DusseDez]

I picked the wrong time to click this thread and not be high smh. Argued about stars for 3 pages.

 

[pyhooya]

If we had a steady stream of starting DTs of McIntosh's ability playing for us every year, would that be anything short of a success?

That wouldnt be bad but I prefer to actually win Nattys not ACC coarstal. Mcintosh was a good DT but wasnt all that. He would flash for a few plays but other than that he didnt do alot. Its like these people that think Lebron is a good defensive player cause ESPiN shows highlight of his one play for the whole game. But it you actually watch how often he is lazy, out of position and just gets beat....

 

[Ver]

If we had a steady stream of starting DTs of McIntosh's ability playing for us every year, would that be anything short of a success?

That would be great, McIntosh had his faults but he had the best year at DT here in while in 2017 until Gerald Willis.

If we had a rotation of Norton, McIntosh & GW, this year our defense wins us two more games

 

[Odysseus]

Guys this is going on 24 hours please let this end guys go back to your families or better yet here's some more booty

 

[Ethnicsands]

If we had a steady stream of starting DTs of McIntosh's ability playing for us every year, would that be anything short of a success?

Jerome Brown, Russell Maryland, Cortez Kennedy, Warren Sapp and Big Vince say ‘hi.’

 

[DMoney]

I am just laughing, after all of this, its over a player that was a second team All-ACC player and 5th Round pick.

Seems like a poor player to plant your flag in to make your point.

You mean the guy who killed Notre Dame, was good enough to leave early, got sick, and still was deemed a Top 150 prospect in the country?

If we sign a pair of three-stars like McIntosh every year, we will never have a problem at DT.

You are missing an important mathematical point.

Just take two pools of 100 kids. Say one groups has a 50% probability of being drafted in the nfl four years later, and the other pool of kids have a 5% probability of being drafted at the same time.

The objective measure for probability is easy. It's whether performance in college (as measured by draft selection in this conversation) is distributed along the lines of the star rankings. That means that vast majority of 5 stars perform at an elite level (although by no means all 5 stars do so), that most 4 stars perform at an elite level although many do not), that many (although not a majority) of 3 stars perform at an elite level, that some 2 stars perform at an elite level (although the vast majority do not, etc. That's the expected distribution of outcomes using the definition of the various star rankings. And this distribution of outcomes is absolutely consistent with the a priori probabilities assigned by the ranking services.

My issue with both posts is that this approach is inherently circular. You argue that Rivals can be “right” on ranking a four-star kid over a three-star kid, even if the three-star kid turns out to be much better than the four-star kid. The stated justification is that the four-star kid is more “probable” to have success, even if it is not guaranteed.

But the only evidence that the four-star kid is more “probable” to have success is that some amateur stamped a four-star rating on him. If they stamped a four-star rating on me, I would still be the same crappy football player. My probability of success wouldn’t change. It’s a circular approach. And with the way you are interpreting the criteria, Rivals and 247 can never be wrong unless a three-star becomes an All-American or first round pick.

That’s why you have to evaluate the rankings based on how the kids turn out. Rivals and 247 have 300+ spots. The say they are projecting forward, which accounts for development and upside. If a Top 300 kid plays like a Top 300 kid, they were right. If he doesn’t, they were wrong. Any other analysis has absolutely zero evidence to support it.

People like to point out that four stars historically have a higher hit rate than three stars. The obvious reason for this is that star ratings mostly track with offers. Kids recruited by bigger schools have bigger ratings. When kids get bigger offers, their rating goes up. If a four-star signs with Rutgers, you can bet he will be “re-evaluated.” That’s why I mentioned in my OP that stars are basically worthless. Offers, on the other hand, are predictive.

Which all ties in to my two original points, which generated this long and fun debate.

1) Stars are overrated. Offers matter, stars don't. Hunte got offered like a four-star.
2) McIntosh should have been a four-star because he performed like a Top 300 player.

 

[canesproponent]

The services were obviously wrong in regard to Mcintosh, Joe Jackson and Michael Jackson. All three players received 3-star ratings and all three have or will have draft positions implying that they were one of the best 200 players in the country.

Some people simply love to "bytch" and cannot accept that they are wrong. It is like playing checkers with a chimp. Every time you make it across the board and ask to be crowned, the chimp eats you chip...

 

[twes.305]

The services were obviously wrong in regard to Mcintosh, Joe Jackson and Michael Jackson. All three players received 3-star ratings and all three have or will have draft positions implying that they were one of the best 200 players in the country.

Some people simply love to "bytch" and cannot accept that they are wrong. It is like playing checkers with a chimp. Every time you make it across the board and ask to be crowned, the chimp eats you chip...

Joe jackson was a 4 star

 

[Ethnicsands]

You mean the guy who killed Notre Dame, was good enough to leave early, got sick, and still was deemed a Top 150 prospect in the country?

If we sign a pair of three-stars like McIntosh every year, we will never have a problem at DT.






My issue with both posts is that this approach is inherently circular. You argue that Rivals can be “right” on ranking a four-star kid over a three-star kid, even if the three-star kid turns out to be much better than the four-star kid. The stated justification is that the four-star kid is more “probable” to have success, even if it is not guaranteed.

But the only evidence that the four-star kid is more “probable” to have success is that some amateur stamped a four-star rating on him. If they stamped a four-star rating on me, I would still be the same crappy football player. My probability of success wouldn’t change. It’s a circular approach. And with the way you are interpreting the criteria, Rivals and 247 can never be wrong unless a three-star becomes an All-American or first round pick.

That’s why you have to evaluate the rankings based on how the kids turn out. Rivals and 247 have 300+ spots. The say they are projecting forward, which accounts for development and upside. If a Top 300 kid plays like a Top 300 kid, they were right. If he doesn’t, they were wrong. Any other analysis has absolutely zero evidence to support it.

People like to point out that four stars historically have a higher hit rate than three stars. The obvious reason for this is that star ratings mostly track with offers. Kids recruited by bigger schools have bigger ratings. When kids get bigger offers, their rating goes up. If a four-star signs with Rutgers, you can bet he will be “re-evaluated.” That’s why I mentioned in my OP that stars are basically worthless. Offers, on the other hand, are predictive.

Which all ties in to the two points I made, which generated this long and fun debate.

1) Stars are overrated. Offers matter, stars don't. Hunte got offered like a four-star.
2) McIntosh should have been a four-star because he performed like a Top 300 player.

you are confusing circular with uncertain. Paly’s gambling example is spot on.

Buying a lottery ticket is a bad financial decision at the time you buy it. That is a certainty. It costs a dollar and has an expected value of much less than a dollar. Someone wins. Does that mean they made a good decision at the time they bought the lottery ticket, or just that they got lucky?

Uncertainty sucks. And you would do well here to point out that it isn’t a cover for all flaws. Thefollowing statements can both be true:

(A) Paly’s correct mathematically and

(B) The rating services (or any of them) have plenty of identifiable flaws and biases in their methodologies and applicaton thereof.

Effectively, Boxing and Paly are singing efficient market theory at you, and you are pointing out in response that some people beat the market regularly. (Please no one bring up Taleb here.)

If you’re right, D$, then you should be able to identify 30 kids today who are materially underrated, and in 4 years, your 30 kids should outperform relative to their service rankings. If you or someone else here cannot reliably do that, then I’m not sure what the debate really is about.

 

[Ethnicsands]

Joe jackson was a 4 star

Rivals had m. jackson as a 4* also.

 

[PalyCane]

My issue with both posts is that this approach is inherently circular. You argue that Rivals can be “right” on ranking a four-star kid over a three-star kid, even if the three-star kid turns out to be much better than the four-star kid. The stated justification is that the four-star kid is more “probable” to have success, even if it is not guaranteed. Precisely right. You've got it.

But the only evidence that the four-star kid is more “probable” to have success is that some amateur stamped a four-star rating on him. If they stamped a four-star rating on me, I would still be the same crappy football player. My probability of success wouldn’t change. It’s a circular approach. And with the way you are interpreting the criteria, Rivals and 247 can never be wrong unless a three-star becomes an All-American or first round pick. No, this isn't correct. Rivals and 247 can absolutely be wrong. The way they can be evaluated to have been wrong, after the fact, is by looking at the distribution of draft choices among 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0 star recruits. If there was a regular, non-outlier series of outcomes where the majority 3 star ranked kids turned out to be the better college player and higher draft choices than the majority of 4 star kids, Rivals' and 247's rankings would be wrong. But Rivals and 247 are not wrong just because some 3 star kids outperform some 4 star kids, which again is the case you're trying to make.

That’s why you have to evaluate the rankings based on how the kids turn out. Agreed. But you have to do it in the aggregate along the entire distribution of outcomes. You can't just pick a few anecdotal examples of outliers. Rivals and 247 have 300+ spots. The say they are projecting forward, which accounts for development and upside. If a Top 300 kid plays like a Top 300 kid, they were right. If he doesn’t, they were wrong. Any other analysis has absolutely zero evidence to support it. No. It's about probability, probability, probability! Not picking a limited number of anecdotal outlier examples. If I go to Vegas and bet the families grocery money on roulette and hit, does that make it a sure bet in hindsight? Or was it always a 1 out of 38 odds proposition, that I just happened to hit on?

People like to point out that four stars historically have a higher hit rate than three stars. The obvious reason for this is that star ratings mostly track with offers. Kids recruited by bigger schools have bigger ratings. When kids get bigger offers, their rating goes up. If a four-star signs with Rutgers, you can bet he will be “re-evaluated.” That’s why I mentioned in my OP that stars are basically worthless. Offers, on the other hand, are predictive. No disagreement from me on this point

Which all ties in to the two points I made, which generated this long and fun debate.

1) Stars are overrated. Offers matter, stars don't. Hunte got offered like a four-star. Sure. I've got no quarrel with this
2) McIntosh should have been a four-star because he performed like a Top 300 player. LOL. No. That's not how probabilities work.

..

 

[LuCane]

The point here is that it’s reasonable to observe that expecting their top 250 kids from Hs to be the same top 250 kids four years later is unrealistic and fails to understand uncertainty and probability. But they also run a flawed, skewed ranking system, and it’s equally reasonable to observe that they underrate some kids for identifiable reasons.

The proof would be whether someone can realiably identify a meaningful pool of underrated kids in advance, say around NSD of their senior year (and then be right four years later by comparison to how the services rated them). If not, then they may be ranking better than anyone else can, and errors are random. But if so, then they are probably not as statisitically driven as you seem to think.

The biggest takeaway I have from the broader conversation is there isn't enough emphasis on "how" the players get selected in and moved around the rankings. If we were to track the data from beginning of year to end, it gives a glimpse of how hilariously flawed a system is because of much of its basis implicitly being "what team" is recruiting the player.

So, this isn't necessarily an evaluation of the player, who one month might be an undiscovered 2*, but literally the next month jump to a 4*. He got that much bigger, faster and his "probability for success" went up that much? Nonsense. Yes, the end rankings and their inherent bias give a glimpse of what player pool is most likely to "succeed." But, it's manipulation of data loosely labeled as "evaluations."

 

[DMoney]

you are confusing circular with uncertain. Paly’s gambling example is spot on.

Buying a lottery ticket is a bad financial decision at the time you buy it. That is a certainty. It costs a dollar and has an expected value of much less than a dollar. Someone wins. Does that mean they made a good decision at the time they bought the lottery ticket, or just that they got lucky?

That example doesn't fly. Nobody ranks lottery tickets.

If you’re right, D$, then you should be able to identify 30 kids today who are materially underrated, and in 4 years, your 30 kids should outperform relative to their service rankings. If you or someone else here cannot reliably do that, then I’m not sure what the debate really is about.

I haven't seen the kids. But my blind process would be pretty simple. I would look at the commitment lists for schools like Ohio State and Clemson and find three-stars with multiple big offers.

The first one on my list would be Marcus Crowley.

 

[DMoney]

No. It's about probability, probability, probability! Not picking a limited number of anecdotal outlier examples. If I go to Vegas and bet the families grocery money on roulette and hit, does that make it a sure bet in hindsight? Or was it always a 1 out of 38 odds proposition, that I just happened to hit on?

Here's where you go astray. Ranking a player is an individual decision that needs to be judged individually. You can't judge that kind of individual decision based on group data.

The roulette example highlights the flaw in your approach. The odds in roulette are fixed. One out of 38. A better example would be making a bet on a football game. You can make bad bets and good bets. Individual decisions with different probabilities of success. If I win 60% of my bets, that doesn't mean that every individual bet I make is sound or based on proper analysis.

That's the situation here. Rivals made a bad bet on McIntosh.

 

[Ethnicsands]

The biggest takeaway I have from the broader conversation is there isn't enough emphasis on "how" the players get selected in and moved around the rankings. If we were to track the data from beginning of year to end, it gives a glimpse of how hilariously flawed a system is because of much of its basis implicitly being "what team" is recruiting the player.

So, this isn't necessarily an evaluation of the player, who one month might be an undiscovered 2*, but literally the next month jump to a 4*. He got that much bigger, faster and his "probability for success" went up that much? Nonsense. Yes, the end rankings and their inherent bias give a glimpse of what player pool is most likely to "succeed." But, it's manipulation of data loosely labeled as "evaluations."

Lu I was headed towards the topic you are mentioning. A huge gap in this discussion is a lack of understanding about what the rating services actually do. The _reality_ of what they do is a lot closer to compiling info on who is recruiting a kid and then rating kids based on who is recruiting them, then it is a true evaluation process. If they were only including info on who is recruiting a kid, the circularity D$ is talking about would be obvious. It’s there, just not entirely circular.

@PalyCane, this is for you also.

Let’s say a quant tech dork geek who is bored bothered to form an algorithm to rank Hs kids. His inputs were solely which schools are recruiting the kid (and which aren’t), where he’s from, what position he plays, his measurables and the roster needs of the schools recruiting him (and the ones that aren’t but geography would suggest should be).

A little machine learning would likely be able to come up with a better ranking than rivals with that info. Except nowhere in that info is there an actual evaluation. And the offer data is self reported and not confirmed. Schools are not even allowed to talk about recruits. They could be recruiting a kid as a courtesy to his coach, to help him get attention for other offers, because they want to get his teammate to commit, or just to confuse their rivals about who they really want. We just don’t know.

The optimal algorithm would be the best predictive measure of future outcomes, and yet it would be missing critical information that if considered might well lead to a different assessment of some subset of kids. How they actually perform on field. Do they like contact or not. Are they still developing physically or already maxed out. So you could well create an optimal general algorithm and still leave room for D$ to validly point out some kids that the algorithm is wrong on. Not because of future uncertain outcomes. Because at the time of the estimate, the algorithm missed important inputs.

 

[Ethnicsands]

That example doesn't fly. Nobody ranks lottery tickets.



I haven't seen the kids. But my blind process would be pretty simple. I would look at the commitment lists for schools like Ohio State and Clemson and find three-stars with multiple big offers.

The first one on my list would be Marcus Crowley.

I suspect you are right that Crowley is underrated, but note rivals has him as a 4* kid, not a 3* kid.

Still, you have to be able to do this for a reasonable number of kids, and be more accurate on average than the services, for this debate to have any relevance. And Crowley is a weird example for you because he did in fact get interest from major programs and is currently going to ohio state. As you point out, the services rely on offers for their rankings, so why are they underrating Crowley?

At the end of the day, you are proposing a ranking service that just focuses on offers and not other indications. That can be tested. Maybe its better than Rivals, maybe not. But the answer must be based on a pool of data, not by reference to one kid here or there.

 

[SpikeUM]

You are missing an important mathematical point.

Just take two pools of 100 kids. Say one groups has a 50% probability of being drafted in the nfl four years later, and the other pool of kids have a 5% probability of being drafted at the same time.

It’s a mathematical fact that some of the 5% kids will be drafted amd some of the 50% kids will not be. That doesn’t mean the pools were defined wrong. You have got to account for the possibility that kid A was in fact a better prospect (measured by probability) than kid B coming out of Hs, but still kid B can turn out better four years later. It does not mean they were wrong in the rating coming out of HS.

There are lots of flaws in the rating services to point out, but the math we should all agree on.

Has anybody run a Fibonnaci sequence on this topic?!?

@PalyCane @Ethnicsands

 

[PalyCane]

I haven't seen the kids. But my blind process would be pretty simple. I would look at the commitment lists for schools like Ohio State and Clemson and find three-stars with multiple big offers.

Ok that works. It's a perfectly fine criteria to say that you'd assign star ratings based on the schools recruiting a given kid.

But then what do you do with the kids who are highly recruited by Alabama, UGA, OSU, Clemson, etc., and then turns out to not be an elite college player and isn't drafted? Use a kid like Ermon Lane as an example. He was recruited like a 5 star. Alabama, UGA, Clemson, etc., all wanted him. Yet, after the fact, do you think he was overrated? Using one of your metrics; i.e. his ultimate NFL draft selection, he was overrated. Yet using your other metric; i.e. quality of the teams recruiting a given kid, Lane was properly ranked. So which is it D$?

Do you see the inherent flaw in the argument you've been making whereby you judge rankings to have been wrong in hindsight depending on draft position? Even your very own criterion, which is based on the programs who recruit a given kid, isn't a perfect predictor of future college or draft choice success. So what do you then do with that?

 

[Ethnicsands]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

 

[DMoney]

Ok that works. It's a perfectly fine criteria to say that you'd assign star ratings based on the schools recruiting a given kid.

But then what do you do with the kids who are highly recruited by Alabama, UGA, OSU, Clemson, etc., and then turns out to not be an elite college player and isn't drafted? Use a kid like Ermon Lane as an example. He was recruited like a 5 star. Alabama, UGA, Clemson, etc., all wanted him. Yet, after the fact, do you think he was overrated? Using one of your metrics; i.e. his ultimate NFL draft selection, he was overrated. Yet using your other metric; i.e. quality of the teams recruiting a given kid, Lane was properly ranked. So which is it D$?

Do you see the inherent flaw in the argument you've been making whereby you judge rankings to have been wrong in hindsight depending on draft position? Even your very own criterion, which is based on the programs who recruit a given kid, isn't a perfect predictor of future college or draft choice success. So what do you then do with that?

Those are two separate points. Lane was overrated. I was guilty of it, along with those big schools. His performance confirmed that he was overrated. It was bad individual evaluation by a lot of people.

But if you are looking for a blind predictive metric, offer quality is a better measure than stars.