Recruiting websites and their stars

Don’t count Utah State coach Gary Andersen as a big fan of Rivals.com, Scout.com or any of the other Internet sites that make a living evaluating high school athletes and consider themselves experts at doing so.

I’m writing this from a Utah State point of view because I cover that team, work with that coach and am interested in how the Internet services factor into a coach’s gameplan — if at all.

After Wednesday’s big National Letter of Intent signing day came and went, Utah State’s class wasn’t rated highly by the likes of rivals.com and scout.com. Why? Because USU’s newest recruits didn’t have as many stars next to their names in the database as some other schools.

And why, often times, don’t those players have stars? Because they didn’t shell out a few hundred dollars to attend a camp or evaluation day hosted by the web sites. That means they weren’t on the lists and therefore did not get evaluated.

I asked Andersen on Thursday when was the last time he started recruiting a kid based on the number of stars he had on a web site.

“Uh, never,” Andersen said. “Those sites are great for fans, I guess, but they don’t have a clue most of the time.”

Case in point, former Utah defensive back Eric Weddle. Andersen coached him at Utah and he came to the Utes with hardly any fanfare from the Internet. He only became one of the best defensive players in Mountain West Conference history and is now a standout with the San Diego Chargers.

And the number of 5-star, sure-fire studs that have been absolute busts is too high to count.

Scout.com and Rivals.com also drew the ire of Andersen when I asked him why those sites claimed Utah State lost every battle it had for an in-state player with BYU and Utah, according to the Internet recruiting gurus, not making a single offer to a player that ended up signing with USU.

“That’s just flat out wrong,” Andersen said. “We did win in-state battles.”

Specifically, new Aggie Bryce Walker — a massive lineman from Pleasant Grove who committed to USU early, then had offers and heavy recruiting interest from Utah among other schools.

“I had to take a look at those Internet sites and laugh a little bit,” Andersen added. “If you believe them, every one of our in-state athletes only had us making an offer to them. If you ask them or their parents, you’ll know a lot of them had multiple offers. Those web sites don’t know what they’re talking about. Just because a coach said they got everybody they offered doesn’t mean it’s true.”

USU recruit Nevin Lawson was offered by Miami late in the process but stuck with Utah State. Chris Fox, likewise, got offers from Nevada and UNLV but the Arizona linebacker stuck with Andersen and the Aggies. And there were several others. And the list goes on.

Andersen took exception to the rating systems that get so much attention from fans, radio hosts and journalists.

For many athletes, economics or geography prevents them from attending the recruiting camps that result in the 5-star, 4-star or 3-star evaluations. That results in getting shuffled right to the bottom of the list of prospects regardless of talent or skill. Simply put, if a kid doesn’t shell out some money to the people running the web site, they don’t get as good an evaluation.

Andersen said he puts four or five times more stock in the recommendation of a trusted high school coach than he does in an Internet jockey. He likewise said most coaches in America do that same thing.

That, he said, is why any Internet ranking of recruiting classes is, at best, a an inexact science based as much on who happened to show up with a check in hand when Rivals.com set up a few cones on a field and asked kids to go through some drills. Those sites are also heavily influenced by high school coaches that promise access to players in exchange for an extra star or two next to their names.

Is Utah State’s recruiting class really the worst in the WAC? Who knows? I honestly could be. But it might also be the best.

Andersen certainly doesn’t think so and, despite the fact I get to sit in a pressbox during football games, I haven’t any more clue on how Alex Hart, Nevin Lawson and Brian Suite will turn out in four years than the next guy. They may end up off the team because of a lack of talent as much as they may end up all-WAC NFL draft picks.

In short, Andersen really likes his recruiting class and could not care less what the ‘experts’ working in their basements think.

After all, Robert Turbin, Diondre Borel, Bobby Wagner and James Brindley with just two-stars recruits.

They’ve turned out pretty well.