It's a Cop-Out: Why Many Penn State fans are completely wrong to Blame the Nittany Lions’ Problems on Recruiting.

"I’ll tell you why Penn State can’t win more games, we can’t land four and five-star recruits anymore.”

I love that reasoning, not because it’s a good argument, but rather because it’s just so ridiculous to blame what’s been going on at Penn State on recruiting. I want to take some time today and run down two big holes in the “we can’t recruit anymore” argument. One, star ratings mean NOTHING after signing day. Two, Penn State’s had plenty of dynamite recruits, and one class in particular, which fell flat on their individual and collective faces.

The idea here is that when you’re a traditional power program like Penn State, with millions of dollars at your disposal, a ravenous fan base and nearly unlimited TV exposure, it matters not whether you land the No. 1 recruit or the No. 250 recruit.

First off, I can’t stand this obsession with star ratings. Recruiting Web sites like Scout.com and Rivals.com have based their entire existence on this practice. The immediate problem with their business is that, most of the time they differ drastically when ranking prospects. I’m not talking about one ranking a prospect a two-star while the other gives him five. But when the whole public perception of a team’s recruiting performance is based on how many four or five-star guys it lands, the system is definitely broken. Sure, I’ve fallen victim to getting hyped up by seeing Penn State land a few “highly rated” prospects (Austin Scott, cough, cough), and the publishers from the recruiting Web sites will tell you it’s an inexact science and the star system is only a guide, far from concrete. But hold on folks, they know exactly how powerful their sites are, and go out of their way to “prove” they know more than the other guy.

“We really hit the nail on the head with this guy,” says [insert site name here]’s publisher. “We had him at five stars coming out of high school, while everyone else had him at only four stars. We knew he’d be a slam dunk.”

Okay, so that’s not exactly what they say, but they have turned this star rating system into—in the eyes of many college football fans—the Gospel of recruiting. I’ve had it. I can understand ranking players from one to whatever, say, 250. You can get a real good feel for how good a kid is by where they end up on the list, without turning it into a class-system. But once you hear that Team A signed two five-stars and seven four-stars, compared to Team B’s five four-stars and four three-stars, fans tend to reduce it down to “Team B’s class isn’t as good, they didn’t get any five-stars.”

Let me reassure you, I’m not saying the star ratings are wrong and offer no indication of how good a recruit could be. I am saying that you can’t use Penn State’s lack of four and five-star recruits as an excuse for losing games.

Penn State’s famed class of 2003 (the 2000 recruiting year) had all the makings of a winner. It was huge, with 29 prospects. It had the stars, the future contributors and the needed depth to see Penn State through to the next national championship. But what did all that hype get Penn State? The worst five-year stretch in Penn State football history. I say five years because some of them were redshirted and played in 2004. That class was decimated by defections, injuries and transfers—does the name “Zac Wasserman” ring any bells? And while one cannot predict those problems, they are a reality that must be considered to determine whether or not the star rating system is a reliable way to judge how a team recruits.

Move on to the crop Penn State took in 2002. Twenty-two players signed to play as a Nittany Lion, including 11 four-star recruits. Among those four-stars were Jason Alford, Levi Brown (DT at the time), Tamba Hali, and Calvin Lowry. All four of them are playing on Sundays. But remember, it also included four-star recruits like Brian Borgoyn, Mark Farris, Josh Hannum, Jim Kanuch, BranDon Snow, Chris Wilson and JR Zwierzynski. I’m not sure if Snow was a complete bust, but he definitely didn’t produce the way a four-star “should.” That means out of 11 four-star guys, only four ended up being good players. Also, it took this class until their senior season (7-16 from 2003-2004, before going 11-1 in 2005) to produce the wins. Just one more thought on this class, Tim Shaw was a three-star, along with Ed Johnson. Jeremy Kapinos was only two stars.

I’m only going to mention two players from the 2003 recruiting haul: Austin Scott, a five-star; Paul Posluszny, a three-star. Enough said.

The 2004 class was a bit more intriguing, as you had a bunch of two and three-star recruits, and then Anthony Morelli and Dan Connor, both rated with five stars. Yet again, the star system failed around 50 percent of the time, not exactly fool-proof the way they’d like you to view it. I know coaching had a lot to do with Morelli’s downfall, but therein rests my point; you can’t make the argument that getting these “super recruits” will make the difference at Penn State.

Finally, let’s take a quick look at this season’s upcoming senior class. Derrick Williams, Deon Butler, Jordan Norwood, and (if he had stayed) Justin King, have become household names over the last three seasons. But you have to remember, only Williams and King were rated with more than two stars (both were five-star recruits). Norwood was barely rated a two-star out of State College High, where he was a basketball star first. Butler, meanwhile, the leading receiver since his first start in 2005, was a preferred walk-on. Doesn’t that just poke a big ol’ hole in the recruiting argument?

I won’t get into the 2006 recruiting class, as they will only be entering their junior seasons in 2008. While they’ve been good, especially on the defensive line, they haven’t had enough time to develop their own class identity. We’ll leave that for next year.

So the next time you’re at the bar or around the barbecue, and someone blurts out “Penn State can’t win until they start landing top guys,” remember that the Nittany Lions have signed their fair share of top-rated prospects over the last decade. However, what we’ve seen is proof that signing a “five-star” recruit means absolutely nothing if no one is around to develop that talent. I’ll give the recruiting services credit, though. They are correct many occasions. I’d say more than half of the top 100 recruits each year play very well for their college teams. But to imply that the star rating system is anything above deeply flawed is naive. The supposed poor recruiting effort Penn State has put forth in recent seasons is a shallow argument. Anyone who uses it to reason for the Lions’ on-field struggles is taking the easy way out, not looking deeper into why there are problems getting that tenth or eleventh win the last two years.

There’s never just one reason a program falls into mediocrity. Recruiting has played a part in that at Penn State, but there is no way for one second I believe it has played a major role in this proud program’s issues.

*Editor’s note: I used the highest awarded rating at the time of commitment for each named player in this article. The star ratings were gathered from Scout.com and Rivals.com.