Most national sites rate UConn’s 2012 recruiting class as the worst in the Big East. CBS’ recruiting analyst Tom Lemming told the Hartford Courant you should “take that with a grain of salt.” He’s “just speculating” but he thinks Internet recruiting sites may be unduly slanted toward top schools. He may have a point.

“What I notice is that Internet sites have to make money and they make that money with the big programs, the Notre Dames, Florida States, Texases. So if a guy goes there, you never see those schools sign a two-star player do you? Well, you do because they see a lot of guys transfer that actually can’t play at all.

“I’m just speculating because I’m not an Internet guy. But sometimes I’ll see a guy is a one-star and all of a sudden the day before signing day he signs with a big school that makes a lot of money for the Internet site and all of a sudden he’s a four-star player. Without doing anything in one day he changes stars. But if the same players signs with a UConn or a Temple or some of the Eastern schools he stays a one-star. That’s where the politics come in.”

High school football scouting is an incredibly inexact science. It is hard to evaluate players. It is hard to compare players across different standards of competition. It’s hard to find every player. Even if you could do all that. You’re evaluating 17-year-olds. As in normal life, some kids get to college and can’t handle it.

Two prominent factors are at play with rankings for schools such as Connecticut. First, recruiting sites have limited resources. They spend those resources (a) on the elite recruits and (b) in places such as Texas, Florida and California where those recruits reside. The farther down the rankings and the farther away from those hotbeds, the less likely the scouting is to be accurate. Some two-star kids from the Northeast, who should be three-stars may slip under the radar.

Second, high-profile teams influence rankings. The process is perhaps not as sinister as Lemming implies. It may not even by conscious. Schools know the landscape better than anyone. Recruit X may be rated initially as a three-star offensive tackle after a workout. He then gets offers from Florida, Alabama, Michigan and Notre Dame leading the recruiting sites to take a closer look and reevaluate him looking for the positives. That’s not going to happen when someone commits to UConn.

Recruiting rankings are flawed and too imperfect to make precise statements. That said, they aren’t wholly valueless. We can’t say for certain how Connecticut’s recruits will fare against Syracuse or Cincinnati, but we can conclude reasonably those kids won’t match up with Alabama’s or Ohio State’s class.

[Photo via Getty]