As the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots get ready to head to the biggest game in football, let’s take a look back at the starting player’s football histories. Most of them were recruited out of high school and evaluated by scouts. SB Nation and 247Sports Composite put together a list to show how almost every player in the Super Bowl 52 game was rated coming out of high school. Each team has a handful of starters who didn’t get ranked before college, either because they weren’t scouted well enough, developed late, or came through high school before the modern recruiting industry (recruits have been ranked publicly only since the early 2000s). Players are judged from 0 to 5 stars.
Patriots
Tom Brady: He was around before recruiting rankings, but SB Nation says they’ve retroactively made him a 4-star.
Rob Gronkowski: 4-star
Chris Hogan: Hogan was actually a lacrosse player in college for Penn State. He was really good, in fact, and was selected as a 2006 Under Armor High School All-American.
Even though 17 out of 22 Patriots were rated three-stars, the Patriots average star rating sits at 2.7 because there were five unrated recruits.
Eagles
Nick Foles: 3-star
Fletcher Cox: 4-star
Zach Ertz: 4-star
The Eagles have an average star rating of 3.5. SB Nation writes that Lane Johnson is one of the more interesting stories on the Eagles’ roster. In high school, Johnson was 6’5″ and 202 pounds. He kept growing and growing, eventually becoming a 6’6″, 317-pound left tackle, though first he was a quarterback.
To sum up: two in every five Super Bowl starters were four-or five-star recruits.
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