Reason No. 839 to hate recruiting. This year's hotshot recruit is Terrelle Pryor, a quarterback who is being compared to Vince Young. (Is that such a good thing?)There are videos galore of Pryor on the Internet and last week we told you about one of his game-used wristbands that was put on eBay for $349.99.
But as is often the case, the nation's No. 1 recruit never makes much of an impact. Scott Bell of the Detroit Free Press spells it out, looking at the top-rated quarterback in the past five recruiting classes.
Yes, we're talking Kyle Wright and Rhett Bomar here, along with Mark Sanchez and Jimmy Clausen. The only one of the bunch to make an impact is Matthew Stafford.
4 comments:
A bit unfair to throw Clausen into the "never makes much of an impact" category. Coming off an injury, he started 9 games as a true freshman and showed steady improvement.
I think you may want to wait and see with Clausen this year before calling him a dud.
Yeah, same with Sanchez - he's started all of 3 games behind a senior QB. Gotta reserve judgment on him until the 2008 season.
No. 1 QB prespect? What a weird way to look at it sinc, in some cases, the top-rated QB isn't even considered one of the five (Sanchez, Bomar) best players in the class.
How about instead we look at the top-2 overall players in each class since I think we can all agree that's what Pryor is:
2007 - Jimmy Clausen, Joe McKnight
2006 - Percy Harvin, Andre Smith
2005 - Derrick Williams, Patrick Turner
2004 - Adrian Peterson, Ted Ginn Jr.
2003 - Ernie Sims, Reggie Bush
2002 - Vince Young, Haloti Ngata
So history tells us that Pryor is probably going to be pretty good, regardless of how the Free Press tries to pick and chose info to fit its argument.
That dang "Free Press!" Always going about making comments freely! We need a more un-free press. ;)
I don't believe that looking at only the top 2 players in each class is a very good rebuttal of the authors point. The point is to consider how inaccurate recruiting predictions and rankings have been. Top two class players aside, it has, without a doubt, been historically inaccurate. Many "five star" players have turned out to be duds and many "two star" players are collecting millions in the NFL right now.
If, after the first two in a class, predictions don't reveal much about what players will show up in actual games, the point stands that the predictions suck.
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