re: How in the world is McKinley not a 5*

He's a 5* but one of the many things these recruiting sites do that doesn't make a lick of sense is they wait to hand out all the 5* ratings until a certain point of the year.

Sounds like Dare Rosenthal

Well if he commits to US, his 4* status is set in stone

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Arik Gilbert: 5* TE that was the number 10 overall player in the country. He's now on his 3rd college.

Justin Jefferson: 2*. The best receiver in the NFL.

I'm not saying recruiting sites have no idea what they're doing. But inaccurate assessments happen all the time.

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Both of these are terrible examples of recruiting sites having "no idea what they're doing."

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elaborate

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Arik Gilbert

Arik Gilbert was the Gatorade Football Player of the Year, and he was the first tight end to do that. He is huge, strong, and speedy. Listen to the interviews of LSU players who played with him here: fast, freaky, shifty, Megatron. He had a terrific true freshman year at LSU. Compare Gilbert with Mason Taylor last year and Thad Moss in 2019.

Gilbert: 35 receptions for 368 yards and 2 TDs in . 8 games in 2020
Taylor:. 38 receptions for 414 yards and 3 TDs in 14 games in 2022
Moss:.. 47 receptions for 570 yards and 4 TDs in 14 games in 2019.

His stats are comparable, and he played in 57% of the games of Taylor and Moss. There's no question Arik Gilbert fell apart later, but he was absolutely an elite prospect. He was truly a 5* recruit.


Justin Jefferson

First, Justin Jefferson was a consensus 3* recruit, not a 2* recruit. Second, this post is a fairly accurate description of his recruitment:

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Jefferson was a higher talented player than his star rating. He was downgraded because he was an academic non-qualifier. He got eligible over the summer and signed with LSU the day before Fall camp opened. This story has been told many times including by JJ himself.

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Jefferson had four offers: LSU, Tulane, Northwestern, and Nicholls State. It was NOT because he committed early and no one offered after that. It's because it looked like he would not be able to play Division I football.

Jefferson did not commit to LSU until August 8, 2017. That's not August of his senior year in high school; that's August of his freshman year at LSU. He enrolled at LSU on August 9, 2017, the very next day. He was a very late qualifier.

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He is on 247. His composite ranking is a 4* though.

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Because recruiting services like ESPN are spectacularly lazy in evaluating talent--particularly talent from smaller markets like Louisiana (unless your last name is Manning). And for some reason, ESPN's ratings are factored into the composite algorithm, which always drags down Louisiana guys' composite scores.

Oh well. We know what we have.

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I would imagine a lot of it is based on competition. 6A schools in Texas hardly ever play a 5A school. We just don't have enough big schools were they only play 5A teams. I think that is why there is some bias when it comes to the ratings.

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That probably contributes, but the biggest factor, imo, is that the rating services are selling entertainment not accurate information. If they accurately rated all the deep south athletes higher then no one from the big markets in the NE, the midwest, or the west coast would pay for the information.