History of rankings and stars?

There have been publications for a long time, and the newspapers typically rank their top 25 of the state or metro areas. The Internet really brought all this out and made everyone a recruiting expert and started the star rankings. The first "star" rankings I know of on a national scale on the Internet was Rivals around 2000 or so. That's just my two cents though.

i was new to CFB in 2000 and i don't remember stars being really prevalent in that spears/clayton classw (2001)

i remember b/c people would always call them 5-stars but couldn't link to the place giving them those stars

the star system was certainly around in 03, b/c i remember being perplexed at JR being a 5-star...pretty sure it was there in 2002 b/c my boy JV got 5-stars from rivals and that was big news. so in that 01-02 era is when they really started as a prominent variable