Star-Crossed Top Recruits of 2005 More Likely to Be Arrested Than Drafted

In 2005, Rivals.com ranked 28 men as five-star football recruits. The players were the cream of the crop, the top football players in America. They signed to play for top teams across the country, from USC to Miami, Penn State to Oklahoma.

There was just one problem: Turns out they were more likely to be arrested than drafted by the NFL.

In the 2009 draft, seven of these 28 men were drafted. Four more left early and were drafted in the 2008 draft. That means there have been 11 draft picks from the 2005 five-stars. Amazingly, that's less than the number of men who have been arrested, 14. If you ever doubted whether being obsessed with college football recruiting was fool's gold, keep this stat in mind: In 2005, five-star recruits were more than twice as likely to be arrested (14) as drafted in the first round of the NFL Draft in 2008 or 2009 (six). There haven't been this many wasted hours on the Internet since first year lawyering.
But it's time for a confession: I'm guilty of being obsessed with college football recruiting. As soon as a recruit commits to my team, I immediately watch all the videos and debate the accuracy of Rivals' vaunted star ranking system. Rivals is always right when it comes to analyzing my teams' recruits. Come February, we all sit in front of our computers and wait for the signing day faxes to arrive. Depending on how many two-star, three-star, four-star, or the glorious five-stars our teams sign, we then assess our recruiting class and dream championship dreams.

Or curse our fan fate.

But no one really ever asks a key question, how accurate is the Rivals star system when it comes to future NFL draft success? The answer? Not that accurate. Eight of the first round picks in 2009 were two-stars, guys who, if your team offered them scholarships, you'd kick the dirt and wonder whether your team would ever compete for championships. See for yourself. If the NFL draft is an inexact science then college football recruiting is akin to treating cancer with leaches.

In all, seven five-stars from the class of 2005 were drafted out of the 255 picks in 2009. Combining that with the four taken in 2008's first round, 11 five-star players from the 2005 class have gone on to be drafted. That pales in comparison to the 135 two-stars and 65 three stars. In fact, guys who would barely merit a mention when they sign with your team (nary a four-star or five-star among them) comprised a whopping 78 percent of the NFL draft picks.

Now it's important to note that there are many more two- and three-star recruits in the country than there are four- and five-star recruits. But I'd always believed, mistakenly it turns out, that the size of the NFL D\draft made it fairly likely that just about every five-star recruit, the jewels of every recruiting class, would get drafted. The reality isn't true. Not even close.

In fact, 2005's five star-recruiting list is more valuable for defense attorneys than it is for NFL prospects. Of the 14 players who would go on to be arrested (and it could even be higher, these 14 arrests I found by a diligent search consisting of typing in arrest and the player's name in Google), none is more disturbing than the No. 4 overall recruit in 2005, Melvin Alaeze. Alaeze was a 6-foot-2, 277-pound defensive end who selected Maryland after a spirited recruiting battle. No doubt Terrapin football fans burned things in the streets. In high school, Alaeze ran the 40 in 4.54 seconds and could already bench press 225 pounds 22 times. His final five schools were Maryland, Virginia Tech, USC, Penn State and Miami. Instead of starring in college he received an eight-year prison sentence at the end of 2007.

The Baltimore Examiner reports:


Alaeze received the most serious penalty of those arrested. So far. He joins his fellow five-stars: Ryan Perrilloux, Tray Blackmon, Jason Gwaltney, Alex Boone, Justin King, Callahan Bright, DeMarcus Granger, Fred Rouse, Rey Maulauga, Demetrice Morley, Ryan Grady, Darren McFadden, and Jerrell Powe as mugshot material. You'll note that a few of these managed the five-star daily double, arrest and first-round draft pick status. That's talent, the five-star cross-over.

In the end, our recruiting obsession is making players stars before they even arrive on campus. And maybe, just maybe, that stardom contributes to their misbehavior once they arrive on campus. When you've been told that you're God's gift to football, begged to attend schools by national championship winning coaches for months, danced with the hottest girls on campus, and had your signing-day decision nationally televised, is it any surprise that you think the regular rules don't apply to you?

You think that because ... they don't.

When you get right down to it, being a five-star Rivals prospect might be the ultimate football kiss of death. At the very least it tells us that we fans are as big of idiots as we already expected we were, the information we use to feed our recruiting obsession is as tasty as rice cakes and water, as filling as empty air.

Last fall, my wife came downstairs at 3 a.m. to find me watching high school highlight videos in the darkness of my office. She thought I was looking at porn. In a way, I was. Rivals recruiting rankings are every bit as fantastical as the finest creations in the Vivid Video stable. We think if we stare long enough at the five-stars we can predict the next two Heisman Trophy winners, the reality is we're more likely to predict the campus police blotter.

Because for the vast majority of Rivals' five-star prospects the moment the rankings are released, the players have reached the pinnacle of their football careers. It's all downhill, and we'll be there to watch the slide. Asking all the while, "How could this have ever happened?"