Recruiting Sites

Since MSU has been enjoying a lot of good press about Coach Dantonio’s recruiting effort, I’ve been looking more closely at the two leading recruiting web sites over the past 12 months.  Most of us are probably familiar with Rivals and Scouts and there’s something that strikes me about their rating systems:  They just don’t work very similarly for the top 30 or 40 teams. 

 

Here is a comparison of what I found (numbers to the right of the school show rank/number of recruits included as of 1/29/09):

 

Rivals                                                               Scouts

 

OSU                 2/24                                          OSU                 1/24

UM                   7/20                                          PSU                 10/25

MSU                15/22                                        UM                   18/20

PSU                 24/26                                        MSU                 34/21

ILL                   32/22                                         ILL                   43/19

 

As you can see Scouts looks slower to confirm new recruits and it seems Rivals gets the scoops on almost all of MSU’s.  Also, Scouts is apparently an affiliate of Fox, a “news” organization that always raises eyebrows in terms of their coverage and assumptions.  Rivals' pages are free of freeze-ups too; not so true for me with Scouts.

 

I’ll bet a number of us watch these rankings and updates over the years and I’m curious about what the rest of you think about their accuracy, might there a temptation to suck up to the SEC in football and ACC in hoops, etc.  So, why do you think they’re all over the map like this and what have you noticed in them over the past few years Spartan-wise?