Shooting Stars and Falling Stars, Part 2

Welcome to the second part of this series examining QBs and how their star rankings match up with their productivity in college. In Part 1 of this series, we laid out the method and reason for the comparisons between QBs and started off the analysis by looking at 5-star QBs. It turns out that they’re almost always really good! Surprise!

The bust rate on a 5-star QB is extremely low, and sadly for Husky fans our dearly departed (to Cal Poly) Sam Huard was one of the very few that tanked, and truly tanked hard. The core of this analysis focuses on 5 years of recruiting classes, from 2017-2021, but I given how few 5-star QBs there are every year I did a high-level quick look at them all the way back to 2010, and he was still the worst performer by a country mile, with Skyline HS’s Max Browne his nearest competition at the bottom of the barrel. Still, 90% of 5-star QBs have turned out to be at least solid, productive starters and around 50% have been all-star performers, including multiple Heisman winners and top-5 draft picks. When it comes to the very top prospects, the ranking services seem to know what they’re talking about.

What about 4-stars?

Looking at 4-star QBs is relevant this week, as this group includes Oregon’s Bo Nix, a high 4-star (96 in the 247 rankings) commit in 2019 to Auburn before transferring to Oregon last season. It also includes UW’s backup in Dylan Morris, at the lower end of 4-star rankings at 91 the same season, though that was still good enough to make him the #5 pro-style QB in the country in that class. We have a lot more 4-stars than 5-stars, of course, with a total N = 63. If you want to slice the sample more thinly, that includes 22 high-4* (rankings 95-97), 17 mid-4* (92-94), and 24 low-4* (90-91), a pretty even spread across the board.

(NOTE: Other ranking systems mark 4-stars as low as .8901, but I’m just rolling with what 247sports.com gives me.)

How the 4-stars stack up against one another? Let’s take a look.

4-Stars Compared to 5-Stars

The overall averages, both mean and median, are a LOT lower for 4-stars than for 5-stars. The 5-stars come out well ahead on mean value, but they come out WAY ahead on median value.

The reason for that is simple: There’s a lot more variability with 4* than 5* QBs, and the ends of the spectrum are more extreme for 4-stars. The two highest-scoring QBs of this 5-year period are Sam Ehlinger and Bo Nix, ranking ahead of any 5-star Trevor Lawrence, with Hendon Hooker sneaking in ahead of Caleb Williams to make it three 4-stars and only two 5-stars in the top 5.

In fairness, Caleb Williams is not even halfway through his senior season, and there’s every chance he’ll end up in the top spot overall by the end of the season, though Bo Nix has a slight lead at this point 226.05 to 221.48 and is putting up big numbers this year too.

That said, you’ll recall how Sam Huard was our gold standard for QB busts at the 5* level with a BIG+ of 6.65. There are four QBs below him in value, and just a whisker ahead of him is fellow Husky QB bust Colson Yankoff.

More to the point, the second-worst 5* QB from the 2017-2021 classes was Davis Mills at 63.77. There are THIRTY-SIX 4* QBs with less productive careers than the second-worst 5* QB, well over half (57%) of the entire 4* QB group. The median BIG+ score for all 4* QBs is 20% lower than the second-worst 5* QB.

To reinforce the point, Davis Mills and Quinn Ewers are close together and then there’s a BIG jump to the next-worst 5*, JT Daniels at 122.52. He’s #10 among 5* and would rank #16 among 4*, so the top dozen or so of each group are actually pretty close to each other. However, of the bottom FIFTY QBs in the two groups, you have 3 5-stars and 47 4-stars.

If you’re buying lottery tickets, 5* QBs pay off a lot more often than 4-stars. Of course, the fact that (most of the time) only some teams even get to play the 5-star QB lottery is another issue entirely, but if you can get them, your expectations should be a lot higher than if you get a 4-star QB.

The trouble with “5-star QBs are great,” of course is that usually, you just can’t get one. In 5 classes, two signed with each of Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio State, and Clemson. Georgia, USC, Stanford, North Carolina, and UW each signed one. That’s it. That’s all there were. The other 120ish FBS schools signed a total of zero. So, let’s look at 4* QBs on their own.

Comparing 4* Stars with Each Other

The QB that actually got me started looking at this question was Dylan Morris. He was a 4-star pick, highly rated but not at the tippity top. He has played some, playing pretty well as a true freshman and not so well as a sophomore under JonDon’s “bang two rocks together” offense, plus a few short relief appearances under Grubb. Is he actually any good? He’s not as good as Penix, that’s clear, but how would he stack up compared to other 4* QBs. The answer? Actually, right about average. In fact, he *IS* the median value in BIG+ at 50.18.

Among 63 4* QBs, Morris ranks #26 in passing yards, #33 in passing TDs, #41 in passer rating, and #28 in total offense (and #21 in most interceptions, which drags his score down). He ranks just a hair behind Hudson Card (Texas/Purdue) and Keytaon Thompson (Mississippi State/Virginia), the latter of whom never threw a pass but racked up over 2800 yards rushing and receiving—hey, he wasn’t much of a QB per se, but he added a lot of value for his team! He’s just ahead of Haynes King (Texas A&M/Georgia Tech), and so far Carson Beck of Georgia, though I’m sure he’ll pass D-Mo soon.

The key takeaway is that Dylan Morris’ career, and guys like King and Card, is actually the most likely expectation for a 4* QB, at least based on the 5 years I analyzed: Guys who can start for at least a year or two and put up decent-but-not-great numbers or be solid backups and spot starters over the course of a multiyear career. This isn’t based solely on being a low-4* either. The 5 QBs listed above, 2 above and 2 below D-Mo, all of them except for him were mid-4* (two at 92, two at 95). If you pull in a 4* QB and wonder how they’ll probably turn out, something like D-Mo is a pretty good guess.

He’s not great. He’s not terrible. His story is yet to be finished (if he transfers or becomes the starter next year). But for now, with what’s already in the books for him as a 4* QB, he is exactly average.

What About the Best 4-Stars?

You’d assume the top-performing 4-stars would be the highest-ranked, but that doesn’t really seem true. They’re actually split very evenly, with 7 high-4* (97 x1, 96 x2, 95 x4), 6 mid-4* (94 x1, 93 x2, 92 x3), and 7 low-4* (91 x2, 90 x5), with a mean value of 92.85, at the low end of mid-4*. Of any ranking, 90 is actually the mode (most common value)!

Even if you just kept it to the top 10 4-stars, you’ve to 3 low-4* (including #3 overall Hendon Hooker), 5 mid-4*, and only 2 high-4* (Bo Nix and Jayden Daniels of ASU/LSU). You don’t have to get the “almost-5-star” level of recruit to have a good chance for star-level performance.

As mentioned earlier, the very top 4-stars actually outperformed the very top 5-stars, and in raw numbers the upper class of 4-stars stacks up very well. If we take a BIG+ value of 100 as an arbitrary cutoff point, that actually gives us a very neat cohort of 10 5-stars (down to JT Daniels) and 20 4-stars (down to Phil Jurkovec). The percentage is a lot higher, with 10/13 (76.9%) of 5-stars reaching that mark, but 20/63 (31.7%) is still pretty good odds for any 4* to become a solid longterm starter or maybe even a star.

What’s the Worst-Case Scenario?

At the other end of the spectrum, you might assume that poor performers would be more likely to be at the bottom of the 4* range, and there’s some truth to that. If we take the bottom 20 4* QBs, there’s some correlation with the low end of the recruiting rankings, with 12 being low-4* (8 at 90, 4 at 91). However, it also included 3 mid-4* and 5 high-4* QBs ending up among the dregs. Overall, the average ranking for the bottom 20 is 92.2, in the low end of the mid-4* range, and hardly different at all than the average ranking of the top-20 4* QBs (92.85).

In terms of production on the field, only one 4* QB put up absolutely zero in BIG+, Matthew Baldwin of Ohio State. He was a low-4* in 2018 who never saw the field. Everyone else did at least something for their team, even if it wasn’t much. This group includes seven QBs who never gained a yard throwing the ball but racked up less than 1000 yards from scrimmage as RBs or WRs or gadget-play specialists. The other 12 never made it past garbage time-level backup work or a couple of emergency starts. That’s not to say they weren’t useful players to have on a team—every squad needs a scout team and depth—but they never made more than a ripple on the field. Consider this the Lindquist Zone of QB play, speaking of local 4-stars that never quite made it big, but who was a dedicated and well-respected teammate.

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of familiar names in the Lindquist Zone in Ethan Garbers (94 rating), Colson Yankoff (94), and local hero Jacob Sirmon (93). It’s not that UW hasn’t been attracting highly rated QB prospects, it’s that out of all of them, Dylan Morris, the lowest-ranked blue-chip QB recruit in those 5 years, was by far the most productive of all of them. In fact, he was more productive than all of them combined. D-Mo’s BIG+ by himself is 50.18; the other four UW blue chips combined for 43.74. The theoretical median value for one 5* and four 4* QBs would sum up to 333.3 (yes, I know, all five couldn’t have played all those games without transferring, though four of them did transfer and still produced bupkiss); the five of them combined for an actual value of 93.92, 72% below the expected value.

That’s probably the worst-case scenario when you’re talking about a team that has “recruited well” in term of star ratings and had very little to show for it on the field.

Of course, next time we’ll talk about one of the reasons WHY those QBs never amounted to much at UW, with our Husky lord and touchdown savior, Michael Penix Jr. and his very own special cohort of 3-star QBs that shared his ranking coming out of high school: Team 85.