Five stars here. Three over there. And two more next door.
This isn’t the Hollywood Walk of Fame but the locker room at the Chargers’ practice facility. Above every locker stall is a placard that’s adorned with a name, number and college alma mater, but also the player’s high school and rank as a recruit.
For instance, quarterback Justin Herbert was a 3-Star prospect out of Sheldon High in Eugene, Ore.
Safety Derwin James Jr. was even more decorated, a 5-Star recruit out of Haines City High in the heart of Florida.
These nameplates aren’t a Chargers tradition but a bit of motivational magic from Jim Harbaugh, in his first season as the team’s coach.
“Everybody had a different path to get here,” said Harbaugh, whose team plays at Arizona on Sunday. “They took their own circumstances and turned them into a success.”
As part of the intake process when a player joins the roster, equipment manager Chris Smith investigates the player’s high school and star rating and has a nameplate made.
The star ranking system began roughly two decades ago as a way to measure the potential of a high school player, who might receive anywhere from zero to five stars.
Commonly, 32 players across the country receive 5-Star rankings, matching the number of teams in the NFL. The thinking is, if all goes to plan — and it never does — those players will be first-round draft picks.
There are plenty of hits, but lots of misses too. A 5-foot-10, 165-pound quarterback from Chico didn’t garner a single star … but Aaron Rodgers did wind up making a name for himself.
Similarly star-free were future NFL standouts DeMarcus Lawrence, Adam Thielen, Lane Johnson and Cooper Kupp. Chargers star outside linebacker Khalil Mack, who has 104 career sacks, was given just two stars.
It’s an imperfect science. No crystal ball can forecast injuries, late bloomers, twists and turns of college careers and the like. But the system is a way for evaluators to ascribe value to their predictions.
“You want a scoreboard,” said Greg Biggins, national recruiting analyst for 247Sports. “You want to be able to say, ‘Hey, I was right,’ or, ‘I was wrong.’”
In the Chargers locker room, wrong is right. Players with zero stars — noted on nameplates as “NR” for no rating — wear that “dis” with distinction.
“Guys with no stars, you understand where they come from,” said backup quarterback Taylor Heinicke, starless out of Collins Hill High in Lawrenceville, Ga. “They’ve had to battle their whole career to get to the point they get to. Some guys are five stars and you’ve been watching them since college. It’s really cool to see a bunch of different types of guys.”
“Always been doubted, underestimated and stuff like that.”
— Nehemiah Shelton, on not being given a star rating in high school
Cornerback Nehemiah Shelton, who grew up in Gardena, was called up from the Chargers practice squad last week. The only star he got at Junipero Serra High was closer to an asterisk.
“My story’s a little different,” Shelton said. “I didn’t get to start until the fourth game of my senior year. It’s crazy. I was like 150 pounds, and I was the only junior on JV — everyone else my age was on varsity. They used to joke with me. They used to clown me. They’d say I wasn’t going to go [Division I], and I was a big believer in myself. I used to say, `Naw, watch.’”
He worked his way up from Long Beach City College to San José State, then had multiple stints with the Memphis Showboats of the USFL and New York Jets.
He’s proudly a zero-star field general.
“That NR? Oh yeah, for sure, no rating,” he said. “Always been doubted, underestimated and stuff like that, that means a lot.”
A few lockers down is cornerback Shaun Wade of Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, Fla., whose team won the state championship each of his four seasons.
For him, those five stars could be a heavy burden at times.
“The expectation is higher for sure,” Wade said. “As a five-star, they expect you to play now at most schools. So when I got to Ohio State, they expected me to play right away, but I probably wasn’t ready.
“I got redshirted my freshman year, and as a freshman you think that’s bad. But it was the best thing for me. When I understood that, and just put my head down and worked, cut out all the outside noise and just worried about what I did, it didn’t matter about the stars.”
It seems what Harbaugh has done by posting the names of high schools and the star ratings has created fodder for conversation among his players, light years removed from those star days. The players all found their way to this celestial destination.
“One thing I always do when I go to a different place or new locker room is I try to get to know the guys,” said Heinicke, whose NFL resumé includes stops in Minnesota, New England, Houston, Carolina, Washington and Atlanta.
“This kind of lets you figure out a little bit about them before you even talk to them. [Receiver] Jaylen Johnson, I didn’t even know he was from my area, and he actually went to my rival high school. I only knew that by reading above his locker. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen that in an NFL locker room and it’s really cool.”
Said receiver Jalen Reagor, a four-star from Waxahachie (Texas) High: “It gets you more in tune with a guy as a person. You figure out where they came from — he’s a three-star, he’s a four-star — and you see the journeys.
“One person can help the other. If you get low in a season, you have a person who was a one-star, they know how to get from one-star to superstar. You may have been a star your whole life and don’t know how.”
Sky’s the limit.