re: Question for the Recruiting Gurus...

To begin with, I'm not a recruiting guru. But I can explain. Recruiting services are for-profit businesses. So they have lot's of criteria driving their decisions other than pure evaluation. For example, Louisiana has lots more talent per capita than Michigan does. But if recruiting services were perfectly honest about that, they'd lose Michigan subscribers.

Also, they can't afford a large enough staff to actually evaluate thousands of HS players, so they need to outsource this. And they need to outsource this vast amount of work FOR FREE. Luckily there is a large group of extremely knowledgeable and experienced evaluators doing this already. They are the college coaches. They won't share their evaluations, but you can get them second hand by observing whom they offer. The best players get offers from the best teams (hence the Bama and LSU bias you keep reading about). Why are the rankings of various sites different? Partly different opinions. But let's say you're running Scout and you're concerned about flagging subscriptions in Louisiana. You can create an instant buzz there by bumping an LSU recruit like, say, Frank Herron.

So the short answer is, the profit motive.