BOL Round Table

BOLers,

Charles, Tim and the staff spent the morning updating the Alabama Recruiting Targets product. It is now up-to-date and we plan for updates every week or every other week in the future.

The database now contains 100 legit Alabama recruiting targets for the 2012 campaign.

This is an important product and one of the best ways to keep up with who the Alabama staff really wants (from our perspective), eliminating much of the "recruiting noise."

247Sports is committed to building products that "paint the picture" and the BOL staff will work hard to make sure these products are properly editorially managed.

Please note that we have divided the list/service into three categories:

(1) Top Targets
(2) High Interest
(3) Evaluated

First, the product is subjective. We take our intel to determine which prospects we feel the staff has made their priorities. Second, we evaluate the "player's interest" in Alabama to determine which of the three categories the prospect will fall into.

Once a player commits to another school and no longer has interest in Alabama, he will be removed from the Targets product, but will still show an Alabama offer on the Player Page. 247Sports wants to keep a record of all of the offers, yet give the individual team site reporters the ability to tell their fanbase the real situation on a player.

For example, a recruit like T.J. Yeldon can show up in the database as firmly committed, but this product gives the editors/reporters from the other schools a platform to show that their respective school is still heavily involved and aggressively recruiting the player, and that there is still some reciprocal interest from the player. No other recruiting service has this capability, which greatly increases the accuracy of our database.

In theory, as we get closer to the National Signing Day the list of Targets decreases significantly. And, the day of Signing Day, the Target's list should be an exact mirror of the Commit list. (obviously there are a few exceptions on NSD).

Remember, this list is also determined by how much interest a player has in the school as well. It is up to each individual team site editor to determine how they manage the product. For example, you may ask why would BOL list the nation's No. 2 overall prospect as a "High Interest Target" and not "Top Target," when obviously Alabama and every other school rates the prospect a superstar. The answer in most cases is because the BOL staff feels that the prospect is a longshot and Alabama is only receiving mild/cool interest from the star prospect.

Ok, here's a look at the definitions:

Top Target: The elite of the elite. Best of the best at each position. A player that has a committable offer.

High Interest: A Player that is at the top of their position and in most cases has a committable offer. In some situations, the player will lose their offer if players from their position commits before them, or Alabama starts running low on available slots.

Interested: This is a Player that we believe does not have a committable offer and are being currently evaluated by the Tide staff. This is also an area to slot players that have conditional offers.

http://alabama.247sports.com/Recruit/Targets

If you have any questions about why specific players were slotted where they were, this would be a good thread to post them and the BOL staff can jump into the discussion.