Everyone's a winner on college football's signing day, except the recruiting services that provide the rankings.
After the prospects become actual college players, the star rankings will be dissected, and when another Aaron Curry or Mark Ingram falls through the system, it will be Miller Safrit's fault, or one of his colleagues at Scout.com or its competitor, Rivals.com.
The rise in popularity of college football has created the thriving cottage industry but has also relegated football talent evaluators to the same circle of public opinion as Congress, the media and lawyers.
When a five-star recruit busts and a one-star booms, the talent jockeys will be blamed by everyone from the college coaches and high school coaches to the parents and especially the message board illuminati.
Being wrong is part of Safrit's job, as much as he would like to avoid the hard truth of his line of work.
"You really don't know how a class, or individual player, will turn out until four or five years after the fact," said Safrit, a North Carolina graduate who has worked at Scout.com since 2003.
After Wednesday's classes are finalized and the rankings are assigned, it's almost guaranteed an unheralded recruit will exceed his star-rating.
Curry, a two-star recruit from Fayetteville in 2004, turned into the best linebacker in the country by his senior season at Wake Forest and the No. 4 overall pick in the 2009 NFL draft.
Ingram, pegged as a three-star running back, won the Heisman Trophy in 2009 after rushing for 1,658 yards in his sophomore season at Alabama.
Ingram beat out a four-star running back in his own class, and a five-star, Trent Richardson, in Alabama's freshman class, for the starting job.
"We missed out on the Heisman winner," Safrit said. "I would still argue until I'm blue in the face that their No. 2 RB [Richardson] is more talented."
There are more mistakes, or overlooked recruits, in football compared with prep basketball because there's less of an opportunity to see the best players compete against each other.
There are more camps and all-star games in football than in previous years, Safrit said, but still not to the level of basketball's summer circuit.
Just the sheer numbers - 85 scholarships in Football Bowl Subdivision football, compared with 13 in Division I basketball - introduce errors on the football side.
Exposure can also be a problem, Safrit said, although the availability of game film is improving.
"You're doing really well if you get to see a player [in person] four times over the process," Safrit said. "If you go to an AAU [basketball] tournament, you can see a player four times in the same day."
Team rankings are the most scrutinized and often get coaches in trouble. You don't need a map to find the correlation between successful recruiting and on-field success at national powers Florida, Texas and Southern California. Each has consistently posted top-5 classes since 2005.
Nick Saban's first full recruiting classes at Alabama, in 2008 and 2009, were both ranked in the top two and helped the Tide win the '09 national title.
But there does seem to be a disconnect between the national rankings of Notre Dame and Florida State and the actual results.
Notre Dame collected a pair of top-5 classes in a three-year span, yet their coach was fired after a 6-6 season.
FSU "won" signing day in the ACC in 2005 and 2006 but stumbled to a 6-6 regular season in 2009. Georgia Tech, meanwhile, had the 11th- and 10th-rated classes in the ACC from those two seasons and won the conference in '09.
The Jackets weren't completely overlooked on signing day. The 2007 class, featuring running back Jonathan Dwyer and defensive end Derrick Morgan, ranked third in the ACC -- four spots ahead of FSU -- and 15th nationally.
And you thought former Yellow Jackets coach Chan Gailey was only good for seven wins a season.
