To believe or not to believe—that’s the question.

Do you believe in the star-rating system or don’t you?  Both sides of the aisle are firmly ensconced in their own belief.

Yesterday, when former 5-star Washington edge defender Sav’ell Smalls announced that he was putting his name into the Transfer Portal “overrated” was probably trending on Twitter.

The other side of the coin is that when a 3-star kid is drafted in the first round one side jumps and says, “see stars don’t matter!”

My contention is that both are true and neither are true.

But when the inevitable cries of “overrated” ring out it isn’t the fault of anybody but those of us in the media making the projection, not the kids.

It is not the kid’s fault that we in the media have projected him one way or another.  We often miss estimating the ceiling and the floor for kids.

Hear me out, though, because that’s not even my point to all of this.

My ENTIRE point is that it’s not up a particular kid to live up to the hype and projections that we in the media are responsible for creating.

That’s media generated BS designed to generate subscriptions.

The star-rating is simply an industry guesstimation.  Without getting too much into the nuts and bolts of the factoring of height, weight, and speed into those projections, I want to look at the how and why kids often beat expectations and why others miss expectations.

A “Rabbit Hole” I don’t want to go down at this time anyway, is the theory of needing a certain percentage of “Blue Chip” players.

The only thing I’ll say on that is that when it comes right down to it, coaching is what matters most.  Yes, a school must recruit at a very high level, nobody who feels that “stars don’t matter” is saying that a school  doesn’t need to recruit at a very high level win a national championship.

For 9 of the teams in the top 10, with a stockpile of blue chip talent, the difference was, is, and will always be the guy at the helm.  The head ball coach matters.

Just look at Michael Penix, he was Washington’s lowest-rated and merely a “3-star” transfer in 2022.  And he finished 8th in the Heisman voting.  The projections of Penix were just as wildly off with him as they were on former 5-star Washington QB Sam Huard.

But were they?

I’m of the opinion that what happened with Huard was more about a series of events well-beyond his control.  For Sav’ell Smalls it was a completely different set of factors.

How did Huard  go from being able to “make all of the throws in the book” to where he couldn’t beat out Dylan Morris?

Likewise, how did Penix go from being an afterthought this time last year to being a top Heisman-contender 365 days later?

I lay Huard “failure” at the feet of former Washington QB coach John Donovan just as much as I assign Penix’s success current Washington OC Ryan Grubb.

Donovan was once thought to be one of the brightest offensive minds in college football, but he had no track record of developing QBs.  However, Donovan was also forced to break in a new offensive scheme on Zoom calls with no Spring or Fall camps.

Not ideal.

Caught in it all was Huard who just wanted to be wear a purple and gold number 7 jersey like his dad.

For 18 months Huard’s growth was stunted—in stunning fashion.  In his only start for UW he threw 4 interceptions in the 2021 Apple Cup.

The returns were that he was not a 5-star QB.  That he was overrated.  But was he?

He’d clearly regressed since stepping into campus.  That doesn’t even take into account that  the Husky receivers were poorly coached at the time.  But they were also trying to learn a route tree on a Zoom whiteboard.

Not ideal.

Lay the blame where you want on that, but my point is that selecting the right system and coaches is CRUCIAL to achieving one’s full potential.

I typically view the stars as for five stars they are likely a three year contributor—three years and they are often gone to the NFL. We saw that with Shaq Thompson. Four stars tells me that they will stick around for four years and three stars they will typically be around four or five. Now, obviously, this is not a hard and fast rule. It is not a law like gravity, but it is how I look at it the stars as far as expectations for them as a college football player.

3, 4, and 5-star kids will often make the NFL, and will usually have significant contributions at the collegiate level.

But, again it is not the kids responsibility to do anything more than go out and play to their utmost potential.

Living up to media-generated hype IS NOT THEIR JOB.

Finding the right school that has the right development for them is.

Finding the right scheme is.

So is finding the right culture and atmosphere is.

Finding the right coach is.

Period.