I get what your saying but I still put more trust in a coaches evaluation than a espn evaluation,
People say this like coaches don't have to go way, way down their boards a lot of times. Even the coaches know some of the guys they are signing are unlikely to pan out, but they take the best they can get during that recruiting year.
They don't get their pick of just any player in the country. A large portion of the best players just aren't going to have any interest for various reasons.
Whereas recruiting services can look at who coaches really want as evidenced by the qty and quality of their offers. They can talk to scouts, and the recruiters from various schools and get an idea of who is highly coveted. And they can do some evaluation themselves.
So no, we don't sign Johnny Three Star because we think he is better than the most highly coveted kids. That almost never happens. We sign him because he is the best we think we can get.
You can say you put trust in the coaches' evaluations, but you don't have the slightest idea what those evaluations are, or how many rejections they had before they signed whoever was left over. The recruiting rankings give you an idea of how successful they were, and they are highly correlated with future success by any statistical measure. That is why we talk about them and value them.
