It’s “National Signing Day” in college football. As usual, Georgia and Alabama have signed the highest-rated classes. How do they determine all this?
It’s a lot of educated guesswork.
Every high school player—who looks like they could play Division-1 football—is essentially scouted by looking at their production, the competition they faced, the eye test (you know—how they look on the field) their height, weight, and how fast they can run the 40-meter dash.
These are fluid rankings of course, but the best-of-the-best are given 5-star rankings—I believe one major publication handed out 33 this year—and then the next tier is four-star, and so on.
The best teams will get up to maybe five 5-star recruits, probably 15-20 4-stars, and some 3-star players in there as well.
Then the main rankings systems—which are Rivals.com and ESPN—assign a certain amount of points to teams for each 5-star, 4-star, or whatever-star recruit and then add them up for each team.
Usually, they’re pretty close. I mean Georgia’s won the last two national championships. Alabama has won 6 of the last 14, but you won’t know how good each class really is until they hit the field.
