I wrote up the mother of all recruiting posts on this. It was like Unicorn tears describing high school defensive backs and then Windows Live Writer ate it. Bill Gates giveth and he taketh away. Enjoy your vaccinating the world and philanthropy and the best recruiting post I’ve ever written. Jerk.

Darian Hicks committed to MSU on June 20th, there was much fanfare, except for where there wasn’t. He had offers from the whole of the MAC and half of the Big Ten including Penn State, which I still can’t quite get out of my head as a prestigious offer. In my head a Penn State offer reads like this right now. Oh, I see Ohio, Buffalo, Purdue, Indiana and Penn State.

A Conversation between my brain and Walter Sobchak

“Hey man, Penn State’s a pretty good offer. They have a long history of success with integrity and shit.”

 

“Eight year olds dude.”

 

 

“Right, eight year olds, forgot about that for a minute.”

 

Hicks was rated a four star recruit by 247, three stars by Rivals and Scout. On your excit-o-meter he should rate as average to good. Hicks was a part of the great wave of commits that occurs after MSU’s camp season.

A Predictor of Future Success is YOUtube

The second video is basically the first with a lot more footage and a lot fewer yellow arrows. If you like watching football, watch the second video if you just want the Cliff Notes watch the first one.

What’s to love about this kid?

On offense, he shows a nifty little one-cut move when turning upfield. It looks like he should get tackled in a handful of these shots and he just doesn’t. He doesn’t have elite breakaway speed. But he’s plenty fast enough to get where he’s going. He’d probably be a fine slot receiver on offense if he ends up over there.

But he won’t. On defense he already shows a good knack for arriving to the receiver at the same time as the ball. He keeps the play in front of him and when his guy gets tackled he stays tackled.  Tackles very well in the open field. Towards the end of the second video one of the guys just starts going ham on throwing deep and Hicks shows good ability to get up there and knock the ball away or pick it off.

40 time.

ESPN lists him at 4.71 which…. is probably pretty accurate. He ran 7.31 in the 60m dash in 2011-2012 Indoor Track. He also posted a 24.3 in the 200 and a 21’1” in the long jump.

Prediction for 2013 and Beyond….

Hicks redshirts in 2013. Fits right in the mold of a Dantonio guy who can cover but also play well in run support, will see the field in an upperclasserly fashion. 

Impact on the remainder of the class

MSU currently has 11 commits at the time of this writing. With the late signings of Jamare Mills, Taybor Pepper and DeAnthony Arnett in 2012 the class of 2013 will be smaller. Add to that out of the 11 commits only one plays on either Offensive or Defensive Line and you have a scenario in which Hicks might be our only corner in the class of 2013.  Something tells me MSU takes one more in the secondary either a CB or S but not both.

A few weeks ago, MSU received commitments from four players in the last week of June. This is pretty typical of Dantonio recruiting to have a slew of commits right after summer camps. With some luck, we can pass the time of watching the grass grow slowly in the heat and maybe even learn a few things about how recruiting happens at MSU. I dove into Excel headlong with some commitment dates from 2010-2013 and set to work with the charts.

1.)  When does MSU land it’s prospects for the year?

For as boring as summer is in terms of football, it’s crazy busy for recruiting. If you follow MSU recruiting at all, you probably know this already. What surprised me most though is that in June, July and August MSU receives over 50 percent of it’s commits for the year. (50.8 percent to be precise).

2.) Does MSU recruit during the football season?

No, they win football games. (Season is defined as Sept – Dec.)

3.) So what’s the plan then?

Well, it might make more sense like this. The peace sign looking object above points to the following. Roughly 1/3rd of all of MSU’s commits come in the January/February push(Signing Day Push), another 1/3rd come in the June/July (Camp Season), the final third come in the other 8 months of the year. While that might make recruiting tremendously boring mid-season, typically this is offset by the winning of football games.

Anyway, not a huge post, but I wanted to highlight how important camp season is to the recruiting cycle at Michigan State and how completely pedestrian in-season recruiting seems to be. Obviously, in-person evaluation in a camp setting is hugely important to Dantonio and staff.

Michigan State has itself a 2013 Quarterback, after Damion Terry committed to the Spartans earlier today. His commitment marks the seventh of the class of 2013 and the fourth on offense. As always, you want a QB to commit nice and early so the staff can go out and recruit knowing who will be the centerpiece of the offense in years to come. Terry is not ranked by Rivals or Scout and rated a three-star prospect by 247.  He selected Michigan State over offers from Illinois, Boston College, West Virginia, Kent State and Toledo and Duke.

Stats

	PA	PC	Percentage	Yards	TD	INT
2011(MaxPreps)	179	97	54.2	1415	13	6
2010(Rivals)	191	99	51.8	1780	19	5

Terry had an outstanding sophomore year and struggled a bit more as a junior. Interesting that the numbers suggest that Terry spent sometime his junior year learning to make shorter throws with higher accuracy but that it impacted his TD to pick ratio. In case you were curious Shane Morris threw only for 14 TDs and 5 Picks his sophmore year.

A Predictor of Future Success is YOUtube

Game Film Review

Note: You MUST listen to some of the background conversation in the Jr Year Highlights. Secret agents and killin’!

In Terry’s highlight video, he does a funny thing a lot in his sophomore video and a little less in his junior year video. He runs the zone read. The only guy who seems to give him a legitimate run for his money in terms of athleticism in the Dantonio era is Tyler O’ Connor. Notice anything weird about this? Two recruiting seasons of Roushar and two mobile quarterbacks. On his home planet of Roushax 5, all offenses are composed entirely of mobile QBs and H-backs.

Terry has that kind of wonky throwing motion that most mobile QBs have, but he probably won’t be in a serious position battle until 2016 so he’s got a while to figure it out. Terry has a nice touch on those sideline go/fade routes. He throws it over the middle a few times with some zip.

Predictions for 2013 and Beyond

Barring doom Terry will have two chances to compete for more than a single year of playing time as the starter. In the fall of 2014, he will be a redshirt freshman battling Cook(RS-Jr.) and O’Connor(RS-Soph) barring injury or transfer to either of them. In 2016, he’ll have a chance to battle again as a Redshirt Junior against O’Connor as a RS-Sr, so yeah, we’re really talking about a guy who will be playing football in 2017 which feels like it cannot be a real year in the future anyway.

Derrick Nix was arrested for possession of Marijuana early Tuesday morning and has been suspended indefinitely. Derrick Nix, why yu no like succes? Nix, who really was exhibiting some leadership characteristics towards the end of the season and burned it down last night with this arrest. A conviction will send him packing and position MSU as ISU’s Official Basketball Feeder Program. “Hey kids, too talented and straight-laced to be a cyclone? Go to MSU and be a dumbass/make Izzo mad/drive drunk/have weed and then get sent packing. We’ve got a home for you waiting in Ames.” It just frustrates me so much I want to punch something.

The most frustrating thing of all was how far Nix had come in the past couple of years. From nearly quitting the team in 2010 because of a lack of playing time to dropping Tommy LaSorda amounts of weight to playing some great inside-outside in the tourney Nix was a man on his way up. So now, that’s all up in smoke.

If Nix leaves, expect additional playing time for Payne and Gauna, but we simply do not have anyone that will fill the gap at the 5 the way Nix can. Anyway, let the courts bear it out and we’ll see where we are in a few months. No rush since there’s no hoops for six months.

Bonus Bits

The Little Brother Blog done growed up and became a part of Bloguin today. Important to note, http://www.thelittlebrotherblog.wordpress.com takes you to the old site, the new site is http://www.thelittlebrotherblog.com. Go there, Mike is a friend of SLS and I’m excited for him he Bloguins his way to fame and fortune.

Tons of recruiting chatter that MSU hosted kind of a Spring Break recruiting day today. DB Antonio Allen, a top 250 guy from Isaiah Lewis’ High School was on campus today as well as OG Nate Jeppeson, OL Poet Thomas and ATH Berkley Edwards. Berkley Edwards is the brother of Braylon Edwards.  Dion Sims is hurt again and will be having surgery again, starting to think that Sims days as a Spartan of Consequence are numbered. I misread Rexrode's post as Sims is not healthy when he in fact is. Hooray Sims! Stay Healthy My Friend!

You’ll notice that whenever a prospect commits to MSU, I always note two things. One, where the prospect has competing offers and two, what their ranking is according to Rivals, Scout and 247.  There’s usually also a bit WOOOO!! involved. I tend to shy away from star ranking as an evaluation tool for how GOOD a prospect is and more often will rely on offer sheet and available YouTube film. Why? Well, because the star system is flawed. Not just in the way that Le’Veon Bell and Jeremy Gainer were misranked as two and four star prospects respectively. Most importantly in that the “quality” of the average B1G prospect has increased by between nine and thirty percent from 2002-2012.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use the Rivals rating system and I’m going to examine Big Ten players. I give them my moneys, they give me the datas, it’s cool like that. In the Rivals ranking system, a prospect receives two rankings. The first is a star ranking, the prospect can receive anywhere between zero and five stars. This is the traditional ranking that some idiot armchair fan from every school cites in the following beer-inspired sentence after a loss “Well, we have a five-star quarterback coming in next year.” Rivals prospects do not get one star ratings, not even the bad ones from Texas, the Lone Star State.

The second rating system is unique to Rivals. Explanation:

The ranking system ranks prospects on a numerical scale from 6.1-4.9.

• 6.1 Franchise Player; considered one of the elite prospects in the country, generally among the nation's top 25 players overall; deemed to have excellent pro potential; high-major prospect
• 6.0-5.8 All-American Candidate; high-major prospect; considered one of the nation's top 300 prospects; deemed to have pro potential and ability to make an impact on college team
• 5.7-5.5 All-Region Selection; considered among the region's top prospects and among the top 750 or so prospects in the country; high-to-mid-major prospect; deemed to have pro potential and ability to make an impact on college team
• 5.4-5.0 Division I prospect; considered a mid-major prospect; deemed to have limited pro potential but definite Division I prospect; may be more of a role player
• 4.9 Sleeper; no Rivals.com expert knew much, if anything, about this player; a prospect that only a college coach really knew about

Getting the data for this one is really going to be a pain in the toucas, so unless someone really wants a follow-up post, I’m not going to dig into that.

For Stars

The quality of the “average” Big Ten prospect increased from an average of 2.80 in 2002 to 3.04 in 2012. Since NO ONE who gets a scholarship offer and gets signed before the rankings are done gets a zero star ranking, I derived the 30 percent number above as (1.04-.8). Even without that, the increase from 2.8 to 3.04 is still a nine percent increase. Meaning on average according to the star rankings, the average Big Ten player is 9 to 30 percent better than they were in 2002.

Are kids really even nine percent better than they were in 2002?

In 2004, Rivals reported that there were 3375 recruits between two and five stars. In 2012, that number jumped to 3469 which is a 2.7 percent increase over 2004. So presuming the power conferences like the Big Ten snatched up the higher quality kids that still doesn’t explain a 9 percent increase. As for the stratification of the “quality class”, in 2004 there were 2437 two-star prospects which comprised 72.2 percent of the class size. In 2012, the 1603 comprised a meager 47.5 percent of the total class. No question about it, the two-star Rivals prospect is a dying breed.

So where did they all go?

In 2004, there were 660 3-Star recruits(19.6% of total) and 244 4-Star Recruits(7.2% of total) and 34 5-Star recruits(1% of total). In 2012 there were 1513 3-Star Recruits(43.6% of total) and 320 4-Star Recruits(9.2% of total) and 33 5-Star Recruits(.95% of total). So as you can see the number of three-star prospects enjoyed a 122 percent increase from 2004-2012. The number of four and five-star recruits enjoyed a 24 percent increase over the same period which would seem ridiculous if it weren’t put up next to the three-star numbers.  Really all of that increase comes from the four-star prospects, five stars have been holding steady at around 1 percent through the years.

So when should I crow about a kid’s recruiting ranking?

From a human decency standpoint, never. Until they’re on the field and out producing their predecessors, they’re not anymore valuable than any other recruit. However, if you must, do not crow about a two-star kid, they should have been a three. Don’t crow about a three-star kid, they’re the new two stars. Four-star prospects are growing at a semi-manageable rate of 27.8 percent from 2004-2012, (that’s like the rate of inflation right?), but even a 27.8 percent increase over a period of time that only saw a 2.7 percent increase in the number of prospects evaluated is still pacing on an untenable track.

If you get a five-star prospect, crow. That’s cool, rare and the likelihood of them being good is high.

So why Offer Sheets?

Prospects pick up the bulk of their offers in the Summer Camp season which is in June and July. So if you receive a commitment during a prospect's junior year the Offer Sheet as a tool doesn't have much merit yet. If the commitment comes after camp season, typically the offer sheet is a better gauge of quality. Also to be considered is what scheme the competing offers come from, if a four-star LB has offers from Indiana and the MAC I'm less excited about that prospect than say a three-star LB prospect with offers from Iowa and Wisconsin.