tribecalledquest wrote:DUBulldog wrote:Exactly....going by ESPN or Scout/Rivals rankings is extremely dicey, especially once you get past the top 50-100 players in the country.
Not trying to be a smartass, but, honestly, at the MVC level how do any of us really know who has "better recruits" than the other teams? It's cool following and reading about them all but any fan that claims their recruits are "better" than someone else's would be grasping at tiny, tiny straws right?
It's hard to tell, really. Different recruiting sites will have different stars, ratings, rankings, etc. A lot of people go by what their favorite or "most prestigious" site tells them how "good" a player is. Then there are those who will compare the list of offers that an athlete has. This is how or why some say that Jeremy Morgan is going to be the real deal because he committed to UNI a day after he was offered by Iowa State.
What many sites don't say or do is remove offers from a list if or when they are pulled. Exhibit A would be Seth Bonifas (2014 I believe) has an Iowa offer according to Rivals, but the Hawkeye die hoards will tel you that there offer is no longer standing. I'm willing to bet that that is what Creighton and UNI did with Schlatter. Could be wrong, but things kind of don't add up with Casey in my opinion. What sites ALSO don't or rarely do, is evaluate or reevaluate an athlete after he is committed. Lohaus committed the summer of his sophomore season. 65 and a 2 star rating on espn. Boom. Done. They don't have to go look at him again because he's not going to a high major program. Like you said, it's MVC talent. Unless it's Top-100 talent, it would be safe to say that recruiting sites don't have the time to keep changing stars and numbers for mid major type players. One of the things that I've also noticed with Schlatter is that ESPN hasn't even changed his status to committed after he verballed to Drake on May 10th I believe (according to Drake Nation)
Then there is also the case where recruiting sites misrate players. For example, there is a 3 star center names Andrew Zelis who didn't have any decent offers (3 total according to Rivals) and ended up going to Stetson. Many remember Brennan Cougill who was an 89 on ESPN and a 3 star on rivals. Well, he could barely make it at UW Green Bay after he transferred. Would you rather have Cougill, the three star? Or a Jordan Eglseder player, who was a 2 star player, but averaged more points and rebounds than Cougill, a player of similar position. (Jordan was the first mvc player I could find that was a 2 star post player).
And speaking of similar positions, I'm not sure why or how we can compare Schlatter and Lohaus because they have different roles. Not to mention that Lohaus played on a team that had 3 division-1 players, possibly others who are playing ball after high school. So in my opinion, that we can throw the argument of whomever averages more points is obviously the better player out the window.
Lastly, the way that I try and get a sense of how good a player may be is how they perform in the AAU circuit. I follow NY2LA on Twitter, and many times they will produce a list of the top performers from a weekend AAU tournament and give updates on what the writers/scouts think of these players. Lohaus appeared on these lists many times over the summer, as did Sclatter (or Ghering, another Drake prospect, I forget which one I saw on the top performers list)
I apologize for the long post. Short story of it is, you can't really judge who is going to be better based on their stars, rankings, etc.
Edit: previously mentioned Seth Bonifas committed tonight to Missouri Western. A D2 school, I believe.
