Congratulations! You made it to Friday. To help you get through the rest of your workday and to tomorrow’s game at LSU, I made sure to fill my Friday Stat Pack full of interesting statistical nuggets from the past seven days. Enjoy!

Do Stars Matter?

This is a topic of conversation that always gets brought up around this time of year because National Signing Day is just around the corner. I hope to do a more in-depth study on this one day, potentially as a summer project, but I thought it’d be beneficial to look at a few basic numbers.

My argument with this has always been that stars may not matter on an individual basis, but they absolutely matter in a more broad sense on a team-by-team basis. For example, being a two-star prospect did not matter to J.J. Watt or hinder him from becoming an All-Pro, but a team that recruits only two- and three-star players is much less likely to outperform those with all four- and five-star recruits. There’s a reason Alabama is consistently in the College Football Playoff.

The numbers seem to back up my theory. In the last two recruiting classes, there have been more than 26,000 players entered into the Rivals database. Only 63 have been five-star recruits and 777 have been four-star recruits. That is 0.2 and 2.3 percent of the entire database. Meanwhile, three- and two-star recruits accounted for 8.1 and 12.2 percent of the database, with 77.3 percent of the prospects receiving no stars.

For a comparison, I examined the makeup of the last two Associated Press All-SEC teams, as well as the Super Bowl LIII and the 2017 Pro Bowl rosters, which I grouped together as professional players. Here is a visual on how the numbers stack up: