Rivals launches service allowing high school players to pay for evaluations

Paying someone to evaluate and promote you to college coaches is generally discouraged to aspiring recruits and their families. If you're good enough, they'll find you, the saying goes. But what if the most prominent brand in the recruiting space threw their weight around to promote their paying clients?

That seems to be the thinking of On3/Rivals's latest venture. 

Rivals, which already offered recruits the ability to claim a recruiting profile for $120 a year (on special now for $48 for the first year), has now launched a service that offers recruits the ability for any aspiring college football player to be evaluated like the 4- and 5-stars, for a cost of $499. 

Rivals/On3 founder Shannon Terry explained the rationale between the new service/revenue stream on Twitter.

1.04M kids played HS football last season. About 6,600 held a Rivals star rating… roughly 0.6%.That's not a talent gap. It's a capacity gap. 

Our scouts have always focused on FBS prospects, and FCS, D-II, NAIA and D-III kids rarely get their film watched.Rivals Recruits puts the same scouts, held to the same standards, on more of that film.You can pay for an evaluation. You can't pay for the result.

Great resource and link for all college coaches and scouts. More opportunities for athletes.

Setting the ethics of a media outlet going into business with the athletes they cover, the ultimate question boils down to this: Will this work? 

"No," one Power 4 head coach said when asked by FootballScoop on Tuesday if he or his staff have ever offered a kid based purely off of their Rivals/247 evaluation. "Never!" said an SEC assistant. 

"Our evaluations and offers come off of camp evals, film, and recommendations from high school coaches. I don't think we've ever offered anybody off of the Rivals/247 evaluation alone," said a different Power 4 head coach. "Most of the time we've evaluated that kid before they have."

Then again, perhaps I was asking the wrong question to the wrong people. The Power 4 kids are talented enough on their own. The idea behind Rivals's new offering is to help the Division II kid get in front of FCS coaches. "We rely on the high school coach as the best source of info on a kid," an FCS head coach told FootballScoop. "Indifferent," a Group of 6 head coach said. "Part of the evaluation process, but not make or break. Good more for initial discovery." 

Elsewhere on Twitter, On3/Rivals marketing executive vice president Jack Terry (Shannon's son) cited 2029 quarterback Colton Dabowski's recent Tulane offer as evidence of Rivals Recruits working. Rivals scout Cody Bellaire spent hours on his film and talking with his coaches, then shared the eval with college staffs. A few days later Tulane offered." 

According to Dabowski's own Rivals profile, the 5-11, 185-pound quarterback from Purcellville, Va., was offered by former UAB head coach Trent Dilfer and has been "contacted" by many of the Power 4 schools up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Did the Tulane offer come because Dabowski paid Rivals to evaluate and promote him, or would it have happened anyway?

Rivals executives themselves would assuredly tell interested parents that their evaluation is not a be-all, end-all of obtaining a scholarship offer. "You can pay for an evaluation. You can't pay for the result," Shannon Terry himself said. An evaluation must be buoyed by having good enough film to play at the desired level, doing the right things off the field, attending camps, the high school coach leveraging his connections, etc. But that begs the original question: What am I getting out of my 499? 

Lots of Rivals Recruits clients will get offers. That isn't in question. The ultimate question is this: How many kids will get offers because they are Rivals Recruits clients?

That will be difficult, if not impossible, to prove. Every kid and every recruitment is different. In an ideal world, you'd need a collection of identical kids, split into two: one group who pursues a scholarship offer the traditional way by attending camps, contacting coaches, leveraging his high school coach, and another who does all of that and also pays Rivals $499 to evaluate and promote him.

It will be hard to truly isolate how effective this new offering will be in producing new offers for aspiring college football players. But one outcome isn't difficult to foresee: On3/Rivals are probably about to make a whole lot of money.