IMO, there is no reconciliation needed.
Robert's statement and your statement are not the same thing.
Robert made a general statement about ranking turning out to be accurate, or not accurate (IN GENERAL), and in general, the rankings are way off.
"... I would side along with so many on college football recruiting rankings if more of these players lived up their star totals..."
He did not say that some kids, or a lot of these kids, do not live up to their star totals. The top programs get more than their share of the high-ranked (obvious) recruits, so they can afford to have misses (e.g., XLK), where-as teams like OSU that do not land a plethora of high-ranked kids cannot afford any misses, none, not even at the 3-star level, and must rely on the very inaccurate services ratings of the kids they omitted from the highest star rankings.
The top programs shed supposedly high rated kids at an unheard of rate, so the kids were not that good? They newest brightest star kids are potentially better? Why does Saben drive so many formerly 4-star kids away?
This star nonsense has been hashed over so many times, I don't know why you would bring it up again.
If there is absolutely no objective criteria for rating a kid as a 5 star or a 4 star, or a 3 star, then the services will always be under scrutiny.... but then, lack of objective criteria works to the advantage of the services because there is nothing concrete to measure their assessments against.
the services do not even have a method to compare the skills of one class versus the next or the previous class. Meaning, were the 5-stars in one season actually only the equivalent of 4-stars in another season?
The services have the capability to rank kids with a "plus or minus", so why don't they? (e.g., 3+ star DE, or 4- star OT)?
Would any of us really feel any better if we knew that Cincy had mostly 3+ star kids and Bama had 4- star kids, but both played in the "selection show playoff"?
IMO, the absurdity of the rankings by the services can be demonstrated with a simple example:
In this year's recruiting class there is a 5-star CB and a 4-star Safety listed next to each other, the only apparent difference is one has a "points" raking of .9835, and the other is .9833, a whopping difference of .0002 !!!! (Derek Williams - LSU lean, and Malik Muhammad, A$M lean)
Seriously..... .0002 is the difference between whether a kid is 5-star talent or 4-star talent?
The services use a point system so that they can manipulate the team rankings without being noticed, not because the kids got better or worse once somebody else watched their film....
about the only thing that I can consistently say about the point system (i.e. star rankings) is that if your team can consistently bring in a lot of kids with points of .850 and higher, then you have a great chance of being a consistently successful program.
