Justin Herbert was a Rivals.com 3-Star with offers only from Montana State, Northern Arizona and Portland State…other than Oregon?
So many people ask why I do not refer to the CBS 247 Recruiting analyses and rankings and use the Rivals.com rankings instead? It is because I often am looking at a longer time perspective, as I compare the current year to previous ones–frequently going back 10 to 15 years. I want consistency in the rankings of players being a 3-Star or 4-Star and for many years, the rankings of 247 were suspect.
Originally, the other major site reporting on recruiting was Scout.com and that nationwide franchise was owned by a Husky. The result was that often you would see a player go from a 3-Star ranking to a 4-Star when he verballed to Washington, while 4-Star recruits verballing to Oregon would suddenly and mysteriously “lose” a star. It happened so often that I could not longer trust the rankings of Scout.com and solely relied on the consistency of Rivals.com.
Then Scout.com was sold to CBS 247 and all the old rankings, (the tainted ones) were now part of the long-term database of player rankings of 247. Thus I cannot make accurate comparisons to the past when using the rankings of 247.
Over time, I’ve also come to respect how it is often more difficult to get that fourth or fifth star at Rivals, and I have to come to respect even more the consistency of how they grade the players. They are tougher on grading, as you cannot believe this player that Oregon took a chance on!
Thus why you will see that I use the Rivals.com player rankings in my articles.