Guys just appear out of nowhere sometimes
In the 2024 recruiting cycle, the 247 Composite rankings ranked 37 cornerbacks higher than Notre Dame freshman, Leonard Moore. Obviously, Moore’s Freshman All-American season made those rankings look silly — just as it made Moore’s offer list coming out of high school look silly.
At one point earlier this week I got involved in a discussion with the boys about scouting cornerbacks. It was my assessment (and theirs) that trying to scout and rank cornerbacks in high school is one of the hardest jobs in college football recruiting. There are so many variables that are involved besides the physical measurables and 40 times, such as:
- Did he really play corner in high school?
- What kind of offenses did he play against?
- Did the defensive system use him properly?
- Did the opposing team even challenge him?
- I feel like I’ve seen the same player in 50 guys — why him?
It’s tough man. As a former cornerback myself, I remember the weird multiple game stretches of very little action in the air my way — and I wasn’t all that good other than I was better than the CB on the other side of the field (maybe — shit, who knows?).
So as we talked about it, I thought about the one data point that I rarely ever use, and decided to look it up for myself. I kept thinking about the best corners in the NFL over the years and how many of them came from mid-level Power 4 schools or Group of 5 schools. I wondered how these teams in the NFL did compared to the collegiate recruiting partners and listed every cornerback drafted in the first two rounds of the NFL Draft from 2015-2024.
Here’s what I found:
- 83 cornerbacks were drafted in the first two rounds.
- The highest pick was #3 and the lowest was #64.
- Only 11 former 5-Stars were selected during those 10 years.
- 2 NO-STARS were selected (#11 pick and #34 pick).
- 65 players were either a 3-Star or a 4-Star with massive differences in overall rankings.
Here’s the full rundown:
I’m not sure how much this all means as I didn’t follow it with any data from their time in the NFL. Still — that’s not what this discussion is about. Just generally speaking, it shows that if a player was good enough to be selected in the first two rounds of the NFL Draft, they were possibly better than their high school recruiting ranking.
This all leads back to another part of this… how has Notre Dame’s pass defense been so good over the past decade and hasn’t had a single corner drafted in the first two rounds of the draft?
I’ll leave that for you to discuss in the comments below.
I’ll stick to my guns about the difficulty of scouting a high school corner to play in college, and tip my hat to the coaching staff for either seeing something more or out of some of their players or really doing a great job of development — or both.