Ever heard of Chris Lewis?

No real reason you should have. He just wrapped up a nondescript career as a Stanford quarterback this fall, one in which he started 19 games through various problems and injuries.

But remember his name. Anytime you see a list of top football recruits or recruiting classes, which you could see a lot of after yesterday’s official Signing Day, don’t forget about Chris Lewis or his mediocre career. Because he’s proof that those rankings matter very, very little.

See, Lewis was once a can’t-miss star, someone destined for a Heisman Trophy and first-round draft status. He was the nation’s No. 1 recruit in 1998, winning the Gatorade National Player of the Year award. Then he went to Stanford and missed, like so many can’t-missers before him.

So let’s learn from Lewis and wait a year or two to judge this year’s recruits. Before you tell your roommate how much better Ohio State’s class was than, say, Florida’s, realize that only a handful of people have even seen these players play, and you’re probably not one of them.

Sure, sizing up classes is fun. It’s a way to grade college football teams and try to get a hold on the future. And, hey, Peyton Manning won the same award Lewis did when he was a high school senior.

Then again, so did Ron Powlus, who spent four years at Notre Dame tarnishing his reputation as perhaps the best high school quarterback of all time.

In the end, the rankings and ratings are irrelevant, a bigger waste of breath than yawning in a smoking lounge.

‘I don’t even know how these kids are rated because I never look at it,’ Pasqualoni said. ‘And that’s the honest truth.’

Pasqualoni learned from experience just how fickle those rankings are. Nebraska was the only team other than Syracuse that had Donovan McNabb on its recruiting radar. Now, McNabb is one the greatest Orangemen quarterbacks ever.

So many teams overlooked McNabb because he played in Chicago, not exactly a high school football hotbed. Preps that play in highly populated and high-profile places like California, Florida and Texas are highly ranked. Thing is, several of those players leave colleges of their choice highly disappointed.

Players from elite regions are also tough to recruit because of the large number of schools vying for the same players. That wasn’t a problem when the Orangemen plucked 6-foot-6, 300-pound tackle David Bouchard, who few teams were interested in, from Quebec, Canada.

That doesn’t make the Orangemen feel like they settled for a second-rate lineman, though.

‘If you put David Bouchard in Texas or Florida or New Jersey,’ Pasqualoni said, ‘he has 100 scholarship offers. We do the work. It’s within our concept of trying to recruit within six hours. We evaluate the guy, we really, really like the guy, we take the guy. Now nobody else evaluates the guy. Nobody else is really in there banging away at this. Am I to be concerned about that? Am I so insecure that some recruiting service didn’t know about David Bouchard so I can’t recruit him? If that was the case, we would never have signed Donovan McNabb.’

That’s just one of the reasons Syracuse disregards almost all outside information and ratings when identifying and grading prospects. Rather, Pasqualoni gathers his own information from countless hours of evaluating and driving to see promising preps. Pasqualoni decided he wanted to pursue J.J. Bedle, a new SU wide receiver, after he watched the 5-foot-9 Bedle play basketball.

By simply digesting drivel from a recruiting service, no one could have known that Bedle competed more fiercely than any player on the floor or played the whole game above the rim. Likewise, a day of reading someone else’s take on a recruit couldn’t replace a half hour of coaching them at a football camp.

Right now, the day after Signing Day, no one really knows who got the best haul last night.

Ever heard of Jerry Rice? Walter Payton? Well, they didn’t even play Division I-A football.

The rankings said they weren’t quite good enough.

Adam Kilgore is the sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear regularly. E-mail him at adkilgor@syr. edu.

Published on February 4, 2004 at 12:00 pm