Nick Saban Credit: The Pat McAfee Show
By Brendon Kleen on

One of the most-repeated details about Indiana amid its surprise success under head coach Curt Cignetti this season is to point out how few four and five-star recruits are on the Hoosiers’ roster.

More precisely, Cignetti’s team has just seven former “blue chip” recruits. The fact that the Hoosiers are on the doorstep of a championship anyway speaks to Cignetti’s greatness and the changing tides of college football.

Driving that point home Monday on The Pat McAfee Show ahead of the title game, longtime Alabama head coach Nick Saban took aim at the websites and content companies that issue those recruiting rankings, claiming that he never paid attention to them when he was a coach.

The criticism was enough for On3 publisher Shannon Terry, who formerly ran 24/7 Sports, to defend his record and the industry as a whole.

“We never, ever looked — and I know (Cignetti) doesn’t either — at how many stars guys had,” Saban said. “Because I think what you all need to do is look at who’s giving out the stars. They don’t know their a** from a handful of sand when it comes to what a football player is. So why would you, as a coach, depend on somebody who’s not even a coach evaluating players to give them stars?”

Comparatively, Miami has an abundance of riches when it comes to top recruits, including running back Mark Fletcher and star defensive lineman Ruben Bain. Of course, when Saban was winning championships in Tuscaloosa, his rosters looked far more like Miami’s than Indiana’s.

But Saban insisted Monday that he paid no attention to those rankings, instead focusing on his evaluations and a player’s mental makeup:

“When you evaluate the players on your own in terms of the criteria of what you’re looking for at each position, that fit in your system, and the criteria of the type of people you want to make the culture of your team what it is … that’s what they’ve done such a great job of at Indiana, in my opinion.”

Cignetti made a similar point when he was hired by Indiana.

However, Saban used a seemingly inaccurate example to highlight his point. The coach said that in the Crimson Tide’s 2016 recruiting class, media evaluators gave running back Josh Jacobs “no stars” while giving his backup, Damien Harris, a higher ranking. As Saban stated, Jacobs is still a top back in the NFL, while Harris is working in media.

Not quite, according to Terry, who brought receipts.

Terry posted a screenshot of 24/7’s evaluation of Jacobs that year, when it gave him four stars and ranked him 92nd in the country overall. Pressed by a follower on X, Terry also acknowledged that recruiting rankings are a subjective, inexact science.

“The recruiting media industry’s rankings / ratings have never been a pure scouting model,” Terry wrote. “A cluster of the data in a rating/ranking is collected from the college coaches and college scouts. They know best.”

“The rankings are a baseline based on internal scouting and school intel.”

Whether we’re talking about high-school recruiting or the increasingly busy transfer portal, it’s impossible for any group to evaluate every player with 100 percent accuracy. And that’s before considering that players are constantly improving or declining.

Still, services like On3 provide value within the industry and to fans by compiling intel and scouting reports to paint the best possible picture of where players are situated in a given moment.

About Brendon Kleen

Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.

View all posts by Brendon Kleen