Eleven Warriors

I prefer scout, but that's mainly because the other two seem to rate players from the south higher as you mentioned. That said, rivals is has a much nicer layout. I'd put them rivals, scout, then a huge gap before espn.

Prolly old news, but I picked this nugget out of the link:

"From the severity of the situation that people made it out to be, I was expecting a lot more," Perkins said.

It is funny to think that there were morons like skip bayless (who actually covered the SMU thing) calling for the death penalty.

http://footballrecruiting.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1309413

Just glad some recruits aren't letting ESPiN make up their minds for them

Scout and Rivals aren't much different really.  Rivals, favors recruiting classes with large numbers of recruits and they also seem to really give guys who are late to declare a significant bump before they declare.  It's strictly to impact their subscriptions and premium information.  

ESPN's recruiting rankings have always been significantly different.  

I don't know what people define as "southern" recruits, but quite honestly overall they are better.  Seriously, Texas and Florida are probably the 2 best recruiting grounds in America.  Georgia is also a great state for talent.  I consider all 3 to be southern recruits.  They have really good talent in those states folks.

ESPiN does their rankings based on total talent in a class, and on filling in team needs. A school that has 3 5* guys, but only 15 total players won't rank as high as a team with 25 players and 12 4*'s. Each year they only put about a dozen players with a 5* rating. So to them, its more impressive to have depth, top to bottom.

Rivals likes putting point values to each player, and adds those points up to determine a team ranking. To me its not as accurate since all you need is a big class to have a high ranking.

Not as familiar with Scout, but i do notice that they have a ton more players considered 5* caliber than the other two.

I actually try to average out all 3 services to gauge just how good the OSU class is each year. Most of it doesn't mean much, but its just fun to do in order to kill time until the fall rolls around.

Football recruiting rankings aren't near as accurate as basketball. With basketball rankings, a guy that is ranked high, is virtually guaranteed to be a great college player. In football, you have way too many "busts." I'm sure this is b/c of the sheer number of players on each sport's roster.

As for the southern players rated higher..... it pretty much comes down to population shift. Since the Steel Belt has turned into the Rust Belt, many families have migrated south and west to find work. When your population goes down, you have less a chance of producing talented, home-grown football players. The recruiting services may skew their high rankings towards the south a bit unfairly, but its obvious that places like Florida, Texas, Georgia and even Louisiana produce top notch talent. Its staggering how many good players come from Louisiana for such a small population. In addition, high population areas in the Northeast often times don't have the resources to produce football players, so kids usually choose basketball in areas like NY and NJ. Inner-city kids just need some sneakers and a ball to play hoops.

Having said all of this, I still consider Ohio a top 5 producer of football talent, which is very impressive considering the size of the state.