Prep talent evaluators up in night with stars

Let's see, is this guy a two star, three star? Or, by golly, is he a nifty four-star recruit? Well, let's just run to the computer and log on to Rivals.com or Scout.com.

Super. Now we know how good he is.

"Fool's gold," says national recruiting guru Allen Wallace of the system of ranking recruits by assigning a number of stars to their name.

Waste of time, says BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall.

Wallace, publisher of SuperPrep Magazine, was quoted in a Charleston, S.C., story last week titled "Grading the Graders."

Aside from about 20 or 30 high school players who clearly stand above the rest each year, the artistry of ranking recruits with this star system is about as scientific as gulping snake oil or digesting ground-up shark cartilage to feel more like a man.

Still, a lot of feverish fans attached themselves to star rankings like mollusks.

Where do these rankings come from?

Scout.com and Rivals.com hold annual combines where they invite an army of high school athletes to participate. Once there, they collect their personal contact information and create a database. At these combines, athletes are measured and weighed. They are timed in the 40 and shuttle run, perform the vertical jump test and lift some weights. All this information is combined into what is called a Sparq score.

The premise is a starting point with some tangibles to determine how good a player/athlete the prospect is. It is also a money-making venture, taking advantage of fan interest, creating a rubber neck-like circus atmosphere to recruiting and elevating the process to a look-who-we-got-and-you-didn't hype.

Bobby Burton, the chief operating executive of Rivals.com, compares this to the public's natural interest in Brittany Spears' ups and downs.

So, you feed the public.

It is also a flawed system. Just because an athlete can run a blazing 40-yard dash doesn't make him a football player. The Sparq score doesn't reflect the football talent of a player like former Ute Eric Weddle or the playmaking ability of Cougar receiver Austin Collie.

An example: Arizona linebacker Austin Nielsen, a walk-on at BYU in the 2005 season, scored the 13th best Sparq score in the country at the 2005 Nike Training Camp, just eight spots below Florida-bound Tim Tebow. Yet, Nielsen didn't receive any college offers and is serving an LDS mission in Tacoma.

Perhaps someday he may contribute at BYU. Or not.