Clearly, there will be players with lower star rankings who are successful in college and beyond. Victor Cruz is actually a poor example as he was an undrafted FA out of college- not like he set the world on fire at UMass. Better examples would be Sam Bradford, Colt McCoy, Sean Weatherspoon, Donald Brown, Kellen Moore, Nick Fairley, and yes, Matt Ryan, all three-star and below kids who had very successful college careers. Quantitatively speaking, there are so many three stars and below players that some will blossom into stars. It is, however, anecdotal. There is absolutely a correlation between star ratings and success at the collegiate level.
There are also indeed examples where a kid is underrated by recruiting services, commits to a name program, and subsequently experiences a jump in ratings. Yes, some of that is pandering to lucrative fan bases, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that maybe, just maybe, college coaching staffs get paid huge bucks to evaluate recruits and are ahead of the recruiting services sometimes in terms of evaluating kids. FWIW, I can't remember a whole lot of incidents where a kid jumped from 2* to 4* just because they committed to a big time school.
A lot of factors contribute to a kid's success at the next level. Many schools are able to out-perform what would be predicted based on their recruiting. At times, UConn has been of that number. Hopefully, that will continue to be the case going forward because the barriers to UConn bringing in four and five-star talent aren't going anywhere.
Nobody is defending Mac. he was generally not very good. But that doesn't in any way shape or form imply that anyone else was better. It means the pickin's were pretty slim last year. this year's recruiting seems very much to be aimed at addressing that issue going forward, which is what you want a coach to do.
