BowlingGreenUKGrad
06-18-2008, 08:56 PM
I guess the basketball recruiting board wasn't the best place to get an answer for this question....
This is an excerpt from an article written by Matt Jones about basketball recruiting services.
Unless one wants to be as consistently inconsistent as our friend above, it becomes necessary to figure out a criteria on which to evaluate recruits, specifically those you havent seen. I have learned over the years that the most effective way to do it (in my view) is find the opinion of someone you trust, who has no interest in the player’s success (aka not a fan of the team) and listen to how they say the individual competes nationally. For me, Dave Telep of Scout.com has been that guy for some time and Evan Daniels is growing into that role as well. These guys see hundreds of players every week, and over time start to evaluate those players in comparison to each other. They see the good patterns and the bad patterns. Their rankings thus act as a good starting point for player evaluation.
However, if you are like I used to be, you might ask yourself, how does this whole scouting thing work? Specifically, what do these scouts base their decisions on? In a nutshell, it involves three things:
1. AAU
2. AAU
3. AAU
There, you now know the basics. In order to rank the players on a yearly basis, scouts focus heavily on AAU. The reason is simple. If every scout does not see every player, the rankings are meaningless. Thus if I see a guy and you see another, how do we compare them? It becomes important then for the scouts to get to see all the players….but great players are all over the country and travel takes to long. In comes AAU, bringing all the best talent into one place at one time. The guys from Scout.Com, Rivals.com, Bob Gibbons etc, descend on these tournaments and camps, see the players playing these glorified pickup games, and make their evaluations. From these evaluations, likely 80% of a guy’s rating is based. It can fluctuate a bit based on high school performance, especially if a player plays in a large market, but the AAU is the base and if you play well or poorly there, your stock is set.OK, if AAU is the basis for basketball rankings because scouts can't get out to see players from all over the nation play in high school games... then what does that say about football rankings? There is no AAU for football.
How can it work for football and not basketball?
This is an excerpt from an article written by Matt Jones about basketball recruiting services.
Unless one wants to be as consistently inconsistent as our friend above, it becomes necessary to figure out a criteria on which to evaluate recruits, specifically those you havent seen. I have learned over the years that the most effective way to do it (in my view) is find the opinion of someone you trust, who has no interest in the player’s success (aka not a fan of the team) and listen to how they say the individual competes nationally. For me, Dave Telep of Scout.com has been that guy for some time and Evan Daniels is growing into that role as well. These guys see hundreds of players every week, and over time start to evaluate those players in comparison to each other. They see the good patterns and the bad patterns. Their rankings thus act as a good starting point for player evaluation.
However, if you are like I used to be, you might ask yourself, how does this whole scouting thing work? Specifically, what do these scouts base their decisions on? In a nutshell, it involves three things:
1. AAU
2. AAU
3. AAU
There, you now know the basics. In order to rank the players on a yearly basis, scouts focus heavily on AAU. The reason is simple. If every scout does not see every player, the rankings are meaningless. Thus if I see a guy and you see another, how do we compare them? It becomes important then for the scouts to get to see all the players….but great players are all over the country and travel takes to long. In comes AAU, bringing all the best talent into one place at one time. The guys from Scout.Com, Rivals.com, Bob Gibbons etc, descend on these tournaments and camps, see the players playing these glorified pickup games, and make their evaluations. From these evaluations, likely 80% of a guy’s rating is based. It can fluctuate a bit based on high school performance, especially if a player plays in a large market, but the AAU is the base and if you play well or poorly there, your stock is set.OK, if AAU is the basis for basketball rankings because scouts can't get out to see players from all over the nation play in high school games... then what does that say about football rankings? There is no AAU for football.
How can it work for football and not basketball?