First off I cannot stress enough how well this podcast I am linking describes the overall recruiting game. This podcast on SBNation is an interesting listen – they discuss “how the nuts and bolts of college football recruiting come together in the days, weeks, months, and really, years before National Signing Day.”

I have written many times that star ratings are given tons of weight by everyone involved in college football recruiting – including the college coaching staffs – even when they say it doesn’t matter.  Now you’ll hear about how coaching salary contracts are starting to include recruiting class ratings (based of recruits’ stars awarded)  involved as bonus items… something that I knew had happened at Maryland.

This podcast is detailed and covers recruiting just the way I have come to understand it after talking with player’s and recruit’s parents over the last eight years.  Two years ago I sat with TE Scott Orndoff (class of 2013) and OL Brandon Ford’s (class of 2016) fathers at the hotel bar before the Pinstripe Bowl and talked for a couple of hours about their son’s recruiting experiences… it was eyeopening and very entertaining to say the least – two wonderful men and very open and honest.  Their thoughts as told to me are  mirrored in the podcast’s recruit’s father’s descriptions of his son’s experience before committing to USC.

Please listen to it folks- I found it to be 100% accurate and really very informative.

I have mentioned before on here my reasoning for the thought and practice of picking one college football recruiting website and sticking with it.  When we do that on the POV, and on here that is Rivals.com’s Pitt site, it adds consistency and a common baseline to our recruiting discussions.

So, with that I wondered if a little behind the scenes look at Rivals.com is in order.  I have written many times that I think Rivals’ Pitt beat writer Chris Peak is the best local media type around Pitt football.  My opinion of him is formed from many things; he’s a helpful guy for one.

When I started writing for The Pitt Blather way back in Dave Wannstedt’s tenure I used to data mine all four websites; Rivals, Scout, ESPN and then later 247 Sports (they started in 2010) for interesting Pitt info and then also began to notice which sites were the most accurate in their individual and class recruit ratings and Rivals constantly came out on top.

I’m not exactly sure what all the other sites do to get their content but Chris Peak just had an interesting Q&A article asking about the business side of Rivals.com and I find it interesting.  Basically Chris wrote this when asked how his employment works:

I’m an independent contractor, contracted by Rivals/Yahoo to operate this site. There are contractual obligations regarding what’s expected in terms of content, message boards, coverage, etc. But there is a lot of autonomy: if what I’m doing keeps the site moving forward in terms of subscriptions, then I’m free to operate the site as I see fit. It’s a pretty good setup and I think that Rivals understands that the individual site publishers often know their market best, so rather than force pubs to do this or do that, they let us do what our market needs, what our readership and audience need, in order to make the site as effective as it can be.

Huh, I wonder if he’s actually the guy who keeps the actual website up and running, does the graphics and all the behind the screen’s stuff that is the nuts and bolts of the website itself.  If so that is a hell of a lot of work.

Continue reading “Some National Recruiting Insights” →