College Football Recruiting: Dispelling the myth stars don’t matter
How does it impact college football?
Now what about at the college level? This is a college blog after all, and it feels like every year in college football there’s a new former unheralded recruit tearing the NCAA up. Well, it’s a pretty similar story.
It’s possible to have a very good team without a number of blue chip players. Wisconsin proves this every year, as do a number of other P5 programs and all successful G5 schools. However, the teams that win championships are the ones with blue chips.
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Bud Elliott of SBNation has done excellent work on the blue chip ratio as he dubs it, and has essentially proven that to win a title, a team has to have five-star talents. In fact, he says that the teams that recruit better are the ones that win titles, every single year, and it’s hard to dispute that with a fact like this: “All of the national champs over the last decade-plus have accomplished it, and often, the team taking home the trophy has signed many more elite players.”
Individually and on a team basis, in college and in the NFL, blue chip recruits have a significantly higher success rate than their non-blue chip counterparts. That’s confirmed, factual, and indisputable. As we see in college football every year, teams like Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, and USC, among other blue bloods are dominant, while teams that struggle to recruit struggle to win at a high level.
That’s the way the game works, and it applies to the next level, as well. Blue chip recruits are far more likely to be successful for one big reason: they’re almost always better athletes than every one of their counterparts. That athleticism is what differentiates the elite from the rest in college football, and in the NFL.
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This doesn’t mean that underrated players can’t be great, they certainly can. It does mean, however, that the next time you see someone say that stars don’t matter, you’ll know that they’re wrong. Inspirational? Yes. Correct? No. Stars matter, no matter how much you don’t want them to.