One can always find four and five stars that do not play in the NFL and 3 stars that do....
In fact, the sheer math numbers would indicate that....since maybe 90% of football players coming out of high school are less than 4 star.
Some good info...
From 2009–13, there have been 160 NFL first-round picks, and looking at the 173 Rivals five-star players from 2005–10 (the first and last year of draft eligible, non-redshirting players) we see that 16% (27) of them were first-round NFL Draft picks. While this number seems less than spectacular, when you consider that there are approximately 2,656 scholarships offered to Division I football players every year (85 players per NCAA D-I team/4=21.5 scholarships x 125 D-I teams) and less than 1-percent of them garner 5-star status, the number becomes a bit more impressive.
The 16-percent (27 players) includes two players selected first in the draft and 16 drafted in the NFL's top 10 picks, or 32-percent of the top 10 in the last five years. Being one of the nation's top 1-percent of high school football players pays off. As a five-star player coming out of high school, you've got roughly a 20-percent chance of being a first-round pick and absolute multi-millionaire.
What about being a four-star player according to ? That would make you a football player ranked somewhere (on average) between the 28th and 300th-best player in the country, keeping you in the top 12-percent of the players in the country.
Pretty good, right? Absolutely. But with that, the chances of being a first-round pick in the NFL Draft plummets to 5-percent, even though 40-percent of all first-round picks in the last five years were four-star players and 30-percent of all top 10 picks were four-star caliber players.
're a three-star player from , then you fall between 301-750 according to their expert analysts, keeping you ranked higher than 87-percent of the country if you're at the top of the three-star list, and and ranking ahead of 72-percent of each and every player getting D-I football scholarships. You're getting a paid-for education at the country's top academic institutions while playing football and gaining legions of fans and the attention of curvaceous coeds everywhere, a pretty sweet deal no doubt but it likely means that your dream of being an NFL first-round pick has gone the way of the dodo.
Only 2-percent of three-star players become NFL first-round selections, despite the fact that the last five drafts have seen nearly 27-percent of the first-round picks come from this group. It's all about the numbers, and the odds are not in your favor. There have been only 43 players out of an estimated 2,250 three-star players eligible for the draft the last five years to become first-round picks, although 13 of those players have been top 10 picks.
In the same span, 2009–13, there were 25 draft picks that were rated two-stars or less who were selected in the first round, and six players (12-percent) who were selected as a top 10 pick. Those numbers sound comparable, but it becomes a significant disparity when you take into consideration that players ranked two stars or less make up roughly 72-percent of all Division I scholarship offers. Bottom line? As a two-star player or lower, you've got roughly a .06-percent of getting drafted in the first 10 picks of the NFL draft, and a .26-percent shot of being selected in the first round, period.
