i'am from south florida,and about 3 weeks ago the sun sentinel news paper had a article on recruiting.they had odoms ranked #2 overall in broward and palm beach counties.
Good point, rockne. Thomas was also ranked as the #1 RB in the entire state by the Orlando Sentinel. That is why everyone needs to take all of these rankings with a grain of salt. Cumulatively, they can paint a pretty decent picture because then a group of opinions is involved, but individually, especially the Scouts/Rivals/ESPN 150's of the world all have their own biases and individual agendas.
There is no doubt in my mind that Rivals has assigned only *** to Thomas & Odoms because of the lack of offers from the Big 3, yet those guys are just like most of us at this point, they have probably seen nothing of Thomas & Odoms except the same grainy films that we have all seen. Yet when I look at those films, especially that of Thomas, I see a great future CFB RB. If I was on the Rivals staff based on that film alone, Thomas would be a 5 star, which is exactly why at this point in time the assigned stars are nothing but a guidepost to an eventual consensus opinion on these recruits. An opinion that BTW means nothing once they suit up for a CFB game.
FWIW, Odoms is a 4 star on Scout, and Thomas is listed as a 1 star, which most likely means they have not fully evaluated him yet. On ESPN, Thomas is ranked #57 nationally, and Odoms is on the ESPN 150 watch list, so they are both essentially 4 stars over there.
The bottom line is Rivals probably just screwed up on their rankings of these 2 guys. I would favor the opinion of the local media over Rivals, especially at this point in time, on guys like Thomas and Odoms, and most importantly, and until it is shown otherwise, I would
always favor the opinion of CW and his staff on the guys they have offered, and they obviously think both of these guys, and especially Thomas, are very valuable possible additions to the Irish football team.