Columnist Ron Kantowski: Recruiting experts take a guess

Thursday, Feb. 6, 2003 | 10 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's insider notes column appears Tuesday and his Page One column appears Thursday. He can be reached at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

To show how irrelevant statistics can be, consider the Air Force basketball team leads the NCAA in team defense. While I love the throwback style of Princeton West, what the Falcons actually lead the nation in is "least productive offense." One truth about never shooting the ball on offense: it keeps the other team from doing the same.

But at least there is a basis for those kind of statistics. What I will never understand is how anybody can rank college football recruiting classes before many of the blue-chippers have even accepted their first illegal benefit.

At least UNLV coach John Robinson is reluctant to join in on this nonsense. As he told the Sun's Steve Guiremand for a recruiting story on Wednesday, "It's always premature to talk about an athlete before he actually plays."

But that doesn't stop these recruiting gurus -- grown men who apparently have nothing better to do than compile 40-yard dash times of high school football players -- from rating these prospects as if they were records on the old American Bandstand.

Well, most of them anyway. But not Dick Lascola, who since 1975 has run the Scouting Evaluation Association as a service to about 80 Division I schools.

"I don't rate players," Lascola told the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer. "I don't know how these (services) could rate them, if they haven't even seen some of them."

Some of them? How about most of them. Outside of a guy such as Tom Lemming, who travels around the country to put his own stopwatch on these future blue-chippers (and even the red and yellow chippers here in Las Vegas), rarely do these so-called recruiting experts see the players up close and personal.

"If we're running a 50 percent success rate, we're doing well," admits Allen Wallace, who runs the Superprep.com service from his home in Laguna Beach, Calif. "A lot of it just has to do with blind luck. All you can do is as much homework as possible and go with your gut."

Go with your gut? Blind luck? 50-50? All I can say is it's a good thing that doctors and dentists are required to hang their credentials on the wall.

But there is a way to determine who got the best recruits that doesn't require a rabbit's foot, a Ouija board or Kirk Herbstreit's cell phone number. Instead of guessing on national signing day, why don't they just wait four or five years, and then make a decision based on performance.

Tired of the rhetoric on signing day, I once did that for one of former coach Jeff Horton's UNLV classes and found that of his 20-odd recruits, only three or four went on to become impact players.

Using that same criteria, Robinson's 1998 recruiting class fares much better. Of the 24 players he brought in, 10 went on to become starters and three (Nate Turner, Ahmad Miller and Jeremi Rudolph) are playing professionally. Using the 50-percent success model, I would give Robinson a B minus for the class of '98. And given that he wasn't hired until December and had only two months to recruit, I might bump it to a straight B.

As for Wednesday's signees, I have no clue, which, trust me, is only slightly less than Robinson and his staff were working with during the recruiting process.

But see me in four years, and I'll be able to tell you something. And unlike all these recruiting services, I won't charge you an arm or a leg.