After almost 20 years of following and writing about football recruiting, for the ACC Sports Journal and many others, I've noticed more than a few trends. With national signing day on Wednesday, now seems like a good time to pass some along.

1. Don't Cry: If your main goal for your favorite football program is to win a national championship sometime soon, pay close attention to the national recruiting rankings on Feb. 1. If your team is not near the top 10, get out the Kleenex. Texas, Southern Cal and the overwhelming majority of other recent national champions fared very well (rankings-wise) on the recruiting trail leading up to their title seasons.

If, on the other hand, your goal is simply for Hometown U. to become or remain competitive, you probably won't have to sweat the details on Wednesday. Historically speaking, it's still a better sign to be ranked near the top of the ACC than near the bottom, but as long as your team signed mostly prospects who also were offered scholarships by several other BCS-conference programs, it probably will maintain an adequate talent level that will allow it to compete on the field.

Within the ACC, the only teams that have not recruited at that minimum level historically are Duke and Wake Forest. Historically, of course, those teams also are the worst in the conference. Also within the ACC, the only teams that have recruited at a top-10 level on a regular basis are Miami and Florida State. The Hurricanes and the Seminoles also are the only teams in the league with national championships over the last 15 years. Which leads us to....

2. Don't Laugh. Every year at this time, you will read and hear -- sometimes from otherwise intelligent, well-intentioned people, sometimes not -- that recruiting rankings are meaningless and/or foolish. These folks very selectively will point out prep All-Americans who became college busts, high school "sleepers" who became college stars, etc. They will encourage you to laugh with them on signing day. My advice: Don't do it.

The world would be a much better place if sports columnists and everyone else saved their strongest opinions for topics they actually knew something about, but that's another article for another day. Suffice it to say that the only people who really are qualified to make educated, thoughtful claims about any quantifiable issue -- in this case, the accuracy of football recruiting rankings -- are those who actually have examined the subject (what a concept!) in some methodical manner.

There are no more than a dozen such people on the planet, and -- much to the dismay of my wife, who says only a real geek would study these things -- I am one of them. Without getting into the gory details -- think frog dissection, only with less clean-up -- every long-term study ever done on this topic (by me or anyone else) has reached the same basic conclusion: A higher PERCENTAGE of the highest-ranked (e.g. five-star, four-star) prospects turn out well (by various definitions) at the college level than mid-ranked (e.g. three-star) prospects, who turn out well in college at a higher RATE than the lower-ranked (e.g. two-star) prospects. Ask anyone who argues otherwise for some actual data -- not anecdotes, mind you, but comprehensive data. You'll be waiting a long, long time.

3. Basketball's Better. Football recruiting rankings never have been, and likely never will be, as accurate as basketball recruiting rankings. Frankly, it's not even close.

Yes, the basketball gurus miss on plenty of guys, too. But if you looked at top-10 lists of high school seniors in basketball over the last couple of decades, you'd see that at least 75 percent of them played in the NBA at some point. If you then looked at players ranked, say, from 101-500 as high school seniors, the NBA number would be less than 10 percent. That's obviously a dramatic statistical difference.

Admittedly, football rankings are much less accurate. There are far more evaluation mistakes, by coaches and gurus alike. Many more prospects are overwhelmed by the jump in competition from high school to college. (In basketball, most of the top prep prospects play head-to-head all the time and face very high levels of competition on a regular basis, so they're both easier to evaluate and less likely to be shocked by the college game.) Lots of players are lost to serious injuries on the gridiron. Academic attrition also takes a much heavier toll on the football side.

4. Academics Matter. One of the inherent flaws in football recruiting rankings is that everyone ranks the classes in February, when the gurus and websites understandably rush to meet the heavy demand for signing day coverage and post-signing day analysis. The more logical time to rank the classes would be in August, when everyone gets to see who made it academically and who didn't.

It's not unusual in the SEC, for example, for a team to announce a celebrated 30-man class in February (backflips!), only to have five or eight or 10 of those signees fail to meet basic NCAA academic standards (sigh). Under the current rules, it's not a high bar, but nevertheless SEC teams routinely lose 15-30 percent of their classes, after receiving all sorts of accolades on signing day.

Over the last five years in the ACC, N.C. State, Clemson, Florida State, Miami and Virginia Tech have lost an average of three or four signees PER YEAR to academic shortcomings. (See ACCSports.com for those details.) Sometimes those prospects enroll later, after prep school or junior college. Sometimes they don't. But they're always included in the team recruiting rankings on signing day, so that's another thing to keep in mind on Wednesday.