Star Power: How recruiting rankings hold up at the top of the NFL Draft

As you know, the first round of the NFL Draft is in the books, which can only mean one thing: It's time for the annual trip into the recruiting archives to get a kick out of how badly the rankings whiffed on today's heroes when they were mere teenage pups. Here's the Cliff's Notes version of Thursday's first-round crop as Rivals saw them as high school prospects three to five years ago:

2011 First-Round Picks by Recruiting Ranking
Click on the player's name to go to his high school recruiting profile.

Five-Star (7): Cam Newton; A.J. Green; Patrick Peterson; Julio Jones; Tyron Smith; Blaine Gabbert; Jonathan Baldwin.
Four-Star (12): Von Miller; Jake Locker; Robert Quinn; Mike Pouncey; Corey Liuget; Adrian Clayborn; Phil Taylor; Danny Watkins; James Carpenter; Mark Ingram; Cameron Heyward; Derek Sherrod.
Three-Star (11): Marcell Dareus; Aldon Smith; Christian Ponder; Nick Fairley; Ryan Kerrigan; Nate Solder; Prince Amukamara; Cameron Jordan; Jimmy Smith; Gabe Carimi; Muhammad Wilkerson.
Two-Star (2): J.J. Watt; Anthony Castonzo.

Even by first round standards, it's a top-heavy group: Six of the top 10 were accorded five-star status as recruits, which is even more impressive when you consider just how few players make up the upper crust in recruiting rankings. Using Rivals' ratings, five-star players make up a little more than one percent of all Division I-A signees every year, and four-star players less than 12 percent; a full 87 percent of incoming players are rated three stars or lower. (In Rivals' system, all DI-A signees are automatically granted two-star status; walk-ons are usually unranked.) But that group produced a grand total of 13 picks Thursday night from a cast of more than 10,000 last year.

Which sounds about right. Based on data from the recruiting classes (2003-08) that have supplied the last five draft classes (2007-11), five-star players go in the first round at a rate of about 1 in 6.5 — that is, one of every 6.5 five-star signees goes on to become a first-rounder — almost 13 times better than the average for all players, which consistently hovers around one first-rounder for every 83 signees across the board. It's a fairly predictable pattern:

The bottom of that graph really doesn't do justice to the huge gulf between the ratio of four-star prospects who go in the first round (roughly 1 in 22, on average) and the ratio of two-star/walk-on players who go in the first round (roughly 1 in 300) but you get the idea: The four and five-star players, a group that makes up a little under 13 percent of the entire population of college players, accounts for just shy of 60 percent of first-rounders.

If that trend looks familiar to regular readers, it should: The distribution of All-Americans in the star system is nearly identical, year after year. Funny how the probabilities never seem to change.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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