he's simply saying that with so many recruits there's bound to be differing opinions even if they don't agree with yours. i'll be honest, their Al Woods ranking jumped off the page because it looked so wrong but unless you've scouted every guy above him on their list and seen them in person and evaluated everything then you're simply favoring the info which matches your opinion. Off the top of my head, it seems they've been less accurate in the past but maybe that's my bias kicking in as well. I have no way to support it.
I guess I have just consistently seen huge differences over the year between Scout and Rivals and my opinion is based on that. Maybe I should give it more of a chance now...But I just don't.
It just seems to me that Rivals just projects college talent better. Plenty of players can dominate high school, but they wouldn't crack the lineup at a decent school. Take a look at the defensive tackle rankings on Scout. A 6'2- 277, 6'4- 260, and a 6'2- 270 guy are rated ahead of Al Woods, who is 6'4- 327 and is every bit of athletic as the other guys.
Was looking at the 2003 class.. what happend to this kid, Daryl Johnson? http://lsu.rivals.com/viewprospect.asp?Sport=1&pr_key=9782 .. 4star DB...
Rivals arrives at their rankings via a committee approach. As I understand it, Scout has one guy gather the regional lists and re-orders them himself. The 'one guy' method alone is more prone to 'wild over/underratings' imo.
Rivals and scout do pretty much the same thing when evaluating. One guy cannot do this my himself, it's impossible. I thin kRivals was way ahead of scout as far as video's and stuff but in the past 2 years scout has at least caught them since merging with Alan Wallace and the other companies. Scouts has merged with 2 other large servies over the past couple of years and they have a lot of resources and guys that do the national rankings like Rivals. Jamie Newberg is not the only one that comes up with the rankings anylonger. Sometimes they rate a guy a little differently from each other based on things like potential and developement, like a Symonette, who has a world of talent but not a lot of experience. And both services move players up and down during their senior seasons and after.
I have belonged to both for several years as a very good friend and I exchanged passwords. In looking at all of the info from both sites I'd say they are very equal and similar in their rankings and ratings. And the difference between being rated anywhere in the top 10 at every position but QB maybe is very negligible usually. Every now and then an Adrian Peterson type comes along that is head and shoulders above the rest. Ny buddy didn't renew his Rivals subscription this year so I haven't looked at Rivals ratings yet, so I can't comment on the differences this year.
