Evaluating college football recruits is about playing the long game. We may start the process when a prospect is just 14 or 15 years old, but the development and forthcoming evaluation periods as a prospect grows is what it's all about.
Ranking prospects is a fluid, very subjective process, and oftentimes there is very little difference between the fifth-ranked player in a class and the 17th-ranked player in a class.
The answer lies somewhere in the weeds. We rank the top 300 prospects in each recruiting cycle, but in evaluating 2,800 prospects in a class, the further down the list you go, the more similar prospects become and the more difficult it is to separate and rank them.