re: Kyle Parker is really good

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Every stat line I see is just pure insanity. Doing it against some really good competition too.

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He’s not even the leading receiver on his own team either

At least according to the article I read a couple weeks ago.

Very talented recruit with great potential. Hope he can catch punts - upgrade our punt return game quickly

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He’s not even the leading receiver on his own team either

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They have three other D1 WRs.

Jaxson lavender, Parker Livingstone (jr) & daylan mccutcheon (sop)

Parker had 1,091 rec. yards, 19 total TD this year. I think lavender is their top guy tho

He looks to be close to 6’ to me. And he’s got some serious quicks and easily blows by people I gotta think he’s in the 4.4 range.

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Looked like a Chase clone in that clip

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It’s uncanny.

Look kinda like Chase against KC last year when he just blew by everybody.

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He looks really good. Anyone know why he's not rated better?

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This really gets into the larger discussion of what recruiting rankings do reflect versus what they should reflect. I'll explain...



Recruiting rankings, very obviously, came into existence for the purpose of rating/projecting how good HS kids would be as college players. As the industry grew and became more competitive between outlets, outlets wanted a metric by which to measure the accuracy of their rankings--so that they could reasonably claim superiority to other outlets.



But for obvious reasons, it's tough to come up with an objective metric. College stats aren't a great metric, because competition level varies, surrounding talent varies, and not everything is easily measured on the stat sheet. Awards and accolades aren't great for similar reasons--e.g. nobody really thinks the random G5 all-american EDGE player who gets the honor cause he racked up numbers against shitty competition is actually better than, say, Will Anderson.


So what these outlets (or, to be specific, 247 in particular) landed on as the most "objective" metric by which to gauge their rankings was the NFL draft. The draft is an efficient market with 32 teams all staking their own best interests on their evaluations. In other words, it's not biased--it may not be perfect, but it's about as objective an indicator of talent as you're gonna get.


The problem is that, when you're judging the accuracy of your rankings based on the NFL draft, you're going to begin to base the rankings themselves on the NFL draft--which, though about as good a single proxy as there is, still isn't a perfect measure of the question "how good was this player in college?".



Accordingly, guys like Kyle Parker, who project to be better as college players than their eventual draft stock would indicate, get "underranked". He's small for his position--smaller than usually gets drafted super high--so he winds up with a lower recruiting ranking than he should probably have. Will Campbell, believe it or not, is another example of this: His arm-length is a little bit below the typical thresholds for what NFL teams look for in a 1st round tackle, so even though he probably projected as one of the 32 best *college players* in his recruiting class, he missed 5* status (because the 32 5*s are essentially the guys that 247 is pegging as future first-round picks).


On the one hand, it's kind of dumb--ideally, they should be rating kids purely based on how good they project to be as college players. That's clearly what everyone is interested in. But on the other hand, I understand using the NFL draft as your measuring stick for accuracy--it's not perfect, for all the reasons listed, but it's still about as good a single metric as you're gonna get. Just one of those things.



tl;dr - recruiting services gauge the accuracy of their ratings via the NFL draft. Accordingly, recruiting rankings lean more towards "future NFL prospect rankings" than "future college player rankings". Parker is a kid who projects better as a college player than an NFL prospect, so he gets ranked lower than he should.