Wednesday is National Signing Day, when college football teams will be ranked according to how they did at signing unproven high schoolers.
This will upset some folks, mainly those whose teams rank below their rivals and especially those whose teams have beaten some of those better recruiters recently. "Ed Reed was a two-star," they'll shout as they surge into battle.
It's okay that these things make some people mad. They're online, after all, and everything online makes somebody mad. The simple fact is that recruiting rankings are at least as good as anything else at predicting how teams and players will stack up in the future, and that's putting it lightly.
Stars matter. Here's the case.
1. They matter at the player level. Blue chips are almost 1,000 percent more likely to be drafted in the first round. You can see the star ratings drop throughout the NFL Draft. And five-stars are about 33 times as likely to be All-Americans as two-stars are.
2. They matter at the team level. Matt Hinton broke the country into five tiers of recruiting might, finding the higher-recruiting schools to consistently beat their lessers virtually across the board. Stewart Mandel:
Power 5 teams (of which there are 65) that consistently recruit Top 20 classes have a 60 percent chance of becoming a Top 20 program and a 35 percent chance of regularly inhabiting the Top 10.
By contrast, Power 5 teams that finish outside the Top 20 in recruiting have a lower than 18 percent chance of fielding Top 20 teams and just a 6.7 percent chance of reaching the Top 10.
3. They matter at the championship level. Before 2015, Bud Elliott predicted the champion would come from a tiny group of elite recruiters, topped by Alabama. That's because every national champion of the ratings era has passed a specific recruiting benchmark.
4. There are major exceptions, duh, like Eric Fisher, who went from being a 240-pound two-star to a 306-pound No. 1 pick*. Bill Connelly, who's way smarter than me, still finds them highly valuable, despite these obvious flaws.
5. Perfection shouldn't be the standard, though. Especially since the four big services get better during the course of a year and more accurate from year to year. Just Rate The Bama Croots Highly has been a winning strategy, for one.
6. So, they matter. But where do they matter most? Bill runs the numbers and finds they matter a lot more on one side of the ball.
7. At the anecdotal level, let's take a look at how all of college football would've changed if one recruit, five-star Tim Tebow, had chosen differently. See how much one commit mattered?
* We celebrate these underdogs, by the way. Here's our All-NFL Two-Star Team.
In closing, here are the 25 lies we will tell ourselves on Signing Day, mostly about how all our unrated recruits are as good as Ed Reed and all our rivals' recruits lack virtue.