Originally Posted by
Diddy
I don't mean to crack on you, but why pay?
I troll recruiting sites, regularly, and I have never paid for any of them. Allow me to break it down.
Rivals: This is my favorite site. They don't do as good a job of player evaluation (for free) as does Scout. But, Rivals has some great freebies. Every week during the season, usually on Wed, they do a free mid week report with lots of good info. Every Friday, their head Guru, Jerry Meyer, has a mailbag wherein he answers reader questions. A Duke question, or a Duke target is probably featured 3 out of 4 weeks. Great Info there. They also offer a lot of other free articles that chronicle big AAU, HS Tourneys, and summer camps. I love Rivals for their free stuff. As a negative, much of their evaluations are really based on a player's pro potential, not his impact at the college level.
Scout: Great player evals. Once the players are seniors at any rate. They are bad to profile a player as a soph or early in his Jr year, and then not update the stats until they are seniors. And once a kid commits, he might as well dissappear as far as they are concerned, unless he is a high major superstud in waiting. I mean a Oden, Durant, Beasly type talent. They do a good job of projecting a kid's impact at the college level, but there aren't a lot of updates.
It really depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking purely for BBall updates, try out prepstars (recruiter's handbook) website. It is all pay, but their publication is great. It recently changed owners, so I am not sure if the quality will continue.
David Glenn bought the Sports Journal, not prep stars. Altough Prep Stars was once an offspring of the original Sports Journal sometimes called the Poop Sheet.
ESPN's premium stuff is a gyp, but they also offer a lot of free stuff.
If you want purely Duke BBall info, Watzone's site is apparantly pretty good. Most of his stuff ends up here, either through him or other sources, but he has a good lead time.
Most of my stuff does not end up here. If it does, I generally print it. There have been some instances though, but that seems to be the nature of things and not a problem for just me. DBR actively seeks to protect others information, but rumors are a hard thing to monitor in a forum of this size.
The main downside of premium sites is the players themselves. If you are looking for interviews that give true insight to a recruits intentions (in a crystal ball sense) you are out of luck. During free previews at Rivals, Espn, and Scout, I have read multiple interviews by the same player given to different homers (sites focused on a single school but owned by the main site). In each of those interviews the kid has made promising statements about that given school. The reality is that these kids are media savvy. They don't really give anything away, at all. Most of the so call gurus, even those devoted to only one school, are wildely wrong a couple of times a year.
[I]I agree that players do not always give honest answers. However some talk to kids as a national site and not mention the school name, thus better answers. I don't think all guru's are wrong. How can you prop up Prep Stars is that much better than Telep, Gibbons or others? I do like Brett and company and think a lot of the Sports Journal as well. No guru has a crystal ball, but they are often cornered and asked to guess. Some of them stay safe and simply give the facts. If a kid lies, what can you do?/I]
My feeling is that with a little work you can get a lot of info, for free, from different sites. If you want to pay, cool. As a Duke fan, Watzone's site is probably the best for Duke specific info. But there won't be a lot of hard facts, cause they don't exist. At best, you are buying early access to info, because it all ends up here, for free, within hours of the news breaking.