Five Star Follies: Part I

The well known and frequently followed college recruiting service Rivals.com recently published an article in which they revealed the names of players that made the Rivals five star football recruiting lists over the last five years. The story was written by the talented Steve Megargee, one of the National feature writers for Rivals who researched the football recruiting classes from 2007 to 2011 and gave a brief analysis of each players success or failure at the college level and in some cases also provided their NFLU draft status. We thought it would be interesting to do a more in depth statistical analysis on his reporting so that we could try to get a "big picture" overview of just how good a predictor the five-star high school recruit designation was at predicting which players would be successful at the college level. So we start off this series of five articles by framing the big picture around the lists of players that received the coveted five star label over the ...