In Reply to: Re: Carson Schwesinger and Cooper Kupp had ZERO stars posted by BruinGreg on November 14, 2024 at 17:08:57
they reflect how analysts (yes, some have good judgement and some less so) evaluate where players are when they are evaluated - in high school. As I recall, thought is a 5 star ought to be able to contribute quite early in his college career, a 4 star pretty early, a 3 star could well earn a starting slot in college after two or three years, etc.
Yes, a stumbling block to that system is that it is, to some extent, assessing how early kids develop but the raters also look at athleticism as well as height and weight and time for the 40 etc. Some are pretty much peaked in high school and don't develop any more later in life; some haven't had their growth spurts yet - some have had them but haven't regained their fluidity of motion at their new size - yet.
And sometimes they miss.
But to ignore how prospects look as high schoolers would be foolish. The rating system is like the subject or headline the editorial desk slaps atop stories. The stories represent the more in depth look the reporter or writer gave to the subject. Yes, good college staffs evaluate tape and their own eye tests when evaluating subjects. But the star thing is a quick preview - useful to flag prospects that coaches should take a deeper look at and to give most of us - observers - at least a quick idea of where the prospects stand with regard to one another.
Somebody jumps out of a building from the fourth floor and survives the fall - broken perhaps but alive. It's an anomaly, an outlier; it doesn't mean that it would be okay for everyone to go jumping out of fourth floor windows and we'd all be okay.
It's a label, a guess where that high schooler would stand with regards to all the others playing his or her sport - at that time. Not the end-all, be-all, and not the complete story - never claimed to be, But useful - suggests a starting spot from which to look further.
Flagg, of Duke, seems to be doing pretty well in basketball. Certainly some of the labels don't work out; certainly some prove pretty accurate; most likely most fall somewhere in between. The system's not perfect. Live with it - this argument is as old as the system itself