Messiah Mickens was the first commitment of the James Franklin era at Virginia Tech. (@messiah_mickens on Twitter)
The 2026 recruiting class is complete, so it’s time for my annual half-star ratings article on the prospects Virginia Tech signed. As a reminder, I do half-stars because I think there are too many four-star and three-star recruits these days and it’s too hard to differentiate between most of them.
Before we get into the rankings, let’s briefly revisit why I do half-star ratings and how I come to the conclusions. This article will have the same intro as it does every year, so bear with me.
For the 2026 recruiting class, the top 32 prospects are all rated as five-star players in the 247Sports Composite rankings. That means the No. 33 player in the country is a four-star recruit. There’s nothing wrong with that, in a vacuum. The problem is that the No. 484 recruit is also a four-star player, and that’s where I have my issue with the star ranking system.
People see four stars next to both players’ names, but the No. 33 player is one spot away from being a five-star while the No. 476 player is one spot away from being a three-star. There’s a huge difference of opinion of each prospect in terms of how they are viewed, but it isn’t reflected in the star rankings, which is what everybody seems to look at first. Therefore, I believe the traditional star ranking system to be a bit antiquated, and thus I’ve started to do a half-star system on TSL.
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