It does yield a return.
Only one QB can start.
It’s the most important position on the team.
If I signed the number 1 ranked QB every year, I will have the most important position in football locked up with a superstar. I guarantee the competition is battle amongst studs, and the ultimate winner of that battle is the best of nothing but studs.
If the other 3 number 1 ranked QBs I got in the 4 year recruiting cycle leave, I still got an amazing return on my investment.
I feel you, but yeah but that's a three year+ data set I gave you so so the "winners" of your hypothetical battles are included. And this is silly anyway, there are rarely three way battles between high 4 and 5 stars. Occasionally (Texas this year, for sure, between Manning and former #1 overall and
transfer QB Ewers), but on average that's not how it works. In fact there often isn't even a battle at all.
I just showed you that over three years there were only 19 total top 100 QB types overall. TOTAL. They aren't all piled up together on a few teams fighting each other. And we also know that some of the best programs often actually ended up having 3-star types win the job over the 4 and 5 star QBs and become college superstars.
There are tons of QB's who were 3-stars or worse, often MUCH worse, who ended up being NFL All-Pros or entrenched starters. In fact, the vast majority.
Philip Rivers, Russell Wilson, Marcus Mariota, Justin Herbert, Baker Mayfield, Sam Bradford, Lamar Jackson, Dak Prescott, Matt Ryan, Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Aaron Rodgers, Brock Purdy, Andy Dalton Kirk Cousins, Ryan Tannehill, Kenny Pickett and on and on.
But to my point, many 3-stars or less (and the bar for our convo should really be sub top 100 anyway) beat out 4 and 5 star QB's to win the job at the
elite recruiting schools that stack the top 100 QBs, where you think these 5-star vs. 5-star battles are happening every year:
Mac Jones - Alabama, #399 player overall
Joe Burrow, LSU #280 player overall (
transfer from OSU)
Jalen Hurts, Alabama, #192 player overall (
transferred to OU).
Jake Coker, Alabama, #511 player overall
Cardinale Jones, Ohio State, (no national ranking, mid 3-star)
Stetson Bennett, Georgia, unranked walk-on who earned a ship
And those are just the non-top 100 rated guys at elite recruiting programs that do land the 5-star types that I can think of off the top of my head who actually WON THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP iirc. None of them were anywhere sniffing a top 100 rating let alone being named a 5-star. How about the guys who just went to the CFP or NY6?
The data is showing that it's really, really hard to evaluate QB's once you get past the 2-3 annual top 10 nationally ranked type all-world types. You need to be able to evaluate, and teams shouldn't get too excited about getting a nationally ranked 50-150 type guy because there is a probably chance those guys won't pan out.
The moral of the story? Numbers. Lots of arms, pack the roster with QB's with tools to increase your odds of hitting one a real one. And for god's sake don't be scared of lower rated guys with tools. Because another term for those guys is "NFL starter." And coaches need to trust their eyes over the Internet rankings that message board peeps get obsessed with.
Now to head off the idiot brigade... I wanted Air Noland bad. And he's a big loss. Not because he's highly rated, but because our coaching staff had him highly rated.
