Decided to Fly

By Quinn Kelly

Starting today, WZBC Sports will be launching an article series entitled Decided to Fly.  These articles will examine individually each member of Boston College’s 2017 football recruiting class.  Written by myself and fellow WZBC Sports contributors Danny Schantz and Matt Sottile, they will try to serve as nice additive blogs to the piece Anthony Iati wrote.  More than anything else, this will be a compilation of all the information from different recruiting sites in addition to what has been said internally about the player.  Our idea with this is to give you a comprehensive yet compact look at the future donners of the maroon and gold.

What You Need to Know

In each article, we will have listed each prospect’s grades from three different sites: ESPN, 247 Sports, and Rivals.  Each site grades on different scale and sees different things in each player, so putting them all together should give a good representation of each player.  For those unfamiliar with the recruiting world, here’s how each sites grading system breaks down:

ESPN uses a simple 100-scale grading system.  Players are graded out of 100 and then assigned a star value to match their grade.  100-90 is a five star prospect, 89-80 is four stars, 79-70 is three stars, 69-60 is two stars, and anything below is a single star or unrated.

247 is a bit different.  They have two grades, one is a composite system that we will NOT be using.  The other, which you will find in our articles, is a simpler ratings system that grades players out of 110.  This scale has more to do at each level with how likely a player is to make an impact right away.  A full breakdown can be found here:

http://247sports.com/Article/247Rating-Explanation-81574

Rivals, our final site, grade on a five star scale.  For comparison’s sake, this should be regarded as very similar to ESPN’s method, just without the numerical grade.

The series is underway on www.wzbcsports.com. Come along for the ride as we introduce you to a few new Eagles each day.