Who Are These Rankings Even For?
It is a curious thing—the way mediocrity cloaks itself in pageantry. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unearned worship of high school basketball rankings, which have become, in recent years, the ecclesiastical vestments of the uninformed. There are few systems in modern sport so fervently believed and so poorly understood, so comically publicized and so privately irrelevant.
Let us start, as we should, with the numbers—since the fetishists of rankings claim to speak their language. A statistical majority of college basketball players, including those who find their way onto Division I rosters, were never ranked. Not once. Their ascent was not charted by pseudo-journalists with media passes and Shopify stores. They earned their place through tape, through time, and through what used to be called proof.
This truth should be sufficient to kill the fantasy. But fantasies, especially the commercially viable ones, rarely surrender to truth. Instead, they metastasize. They institutionalize. They become curriculum.
The rankings machine does not reward talent; it rewards timing. It blesses the early bloomer, the loud trainer, the child whose parents can afford the showcase circuit and the film crew. The system punishes patience, development, and anyone foolish enough to peak after sophomore year. It is not a meritocracy. It is a résumé mill, fueled by delusion and financed by those who mistake access for credibility.
One must admire, if only for its gall, the sheer nerve of the apparatus. It has convinced families to pay for the privilege of being misled. It has made coaches complicit by bombarding them with highlight tapes that show everything except whether the player can play. It has convinced teenagers to become mascots for their own commodification. And in doing so, it has produced a generation who believe that being seen is the same as being prepared.
To those who insist this system has value, I offer a single challenge: name one coach, worth his clipboard, who recruits off ranking lists rather than game film. You will find none. Because the coach’s job is to win. The scout’s job is to promote. And the difference, though rarely acknowledged, is vast.
The tragedy here is not just that so many are misled—it is that so few stop to ask why. Why must a 16-year-old be ranked in order to feel real? Why must his legitimacy be outsourced to a stranger with a camera and a platform? The answer is simple and ugly: because too many adults have abdicated the responsibility of discernment. They’d rather outsource it to heuristic machinery and hype men. It absolves them of blame when the whole thing collapses.
Meanwhile, the unranked player—the one without fanfare, without handlers, without the shiny metrics—works. He develops. He watches the absurd circus from outside the tent, and if he’s smart, he thanks whatever force kept him out of it. He will arrive at college without the conceptual fallacy that visibility and validation are synonymous. And when the ranked player washes out—as so many do—he’ll still be there. Whole. Undistracted. Capable.
Because unlike hype, film does not negotiate. It doesn’t care who sponsored your jersey. It doesn’t ask how many followers you have. It simply shows what happened—and what didn’t. And what it shows, the honest evaluator cannot ignore.
Author’s Note
The most dangerous lie is not that rankings matter—it is that they confer meaning. They do not. Meaning is conferred by work. By time. By repetition beneath indifference. The rest is theatrics disguised as data.