Not at all. As someone else pointed out, a lot of the 3* of certain recruiters get bumps. But they also have 3* players who are elite talents and the recruiting sites STILL miss them.
Well... not exactly. They miss on about 40% of their 5* if you use the NFL draft as a measure. Obviously some get injured or have some other issue but that should be factored in... and shouldn't be much more than 10% or so. But the bigger thing is that they hedge their results to make them look better than they truly are. They arbitrarily limit the number of 5* they hand out. They still miss 40% but how high would that be if they tried to use a single standard and give every player deserving of 5* the rating whether there were 50 or 5?
If they truly attempted to give every deserving player 4* then they wouldn't even have the 20% hit ratio they have.
We? It isn't essential for fans to have any system much less a better one. Much like the NFL, big programs use recruiting consultants. They're tasked with finding and/or doing initial evaluations of talent. If I understand correctly, UT was one of the first to use one. They're paid to give coaches accurate assessments. The coaches then do their own evaluations but from a smaller set of recruits.
The public recruiting sites indirectly steal their work by recognizing which programs have more success and taking special care to "evaluate" the players they're pursuing the hardest.
Another proof of their inaccuracy is that while they correspond reasonably well with the top 5 teams but get significantly worse after that.
Last year's top 25 teams and their composite talent according to 247:
1. Georgia (14-1) ---------------------2
2. Alabama (13-2)--------------------1
3. Michigan (12-2)------------------ 15
4. Cincinnati (13-1)------------------54
5. Baylor (12-2) ---------------------41
6. Ohio State (11-2) -----------------3
7. Oklahoma State (12-2)----------47
8. Notre Dame (11-2)--------------12
9. Michigan State (11-2)-----------37
10. Oklahoma (11-2)----------------6
11. Ole Miss (10-3) ----------------27
12. Utah (10-4)---------------------32
13. Pittsburgh (11-3) -------------36
14. Clemson (10-3) ----------------4
15. Wake Forest (11-3)------------65
16. Louisiana-Lafayette (13-1)-----85
17. Houston (12-2)-----------------71
18. Kentucky (10-3) ---------------31
19. BYU (10-3) ------------------- 108
20. NC State (9-3) ----------------35
21. Arkansas (9-4)----------------28
22. Oregon (10-4) -----------------9
23. Iowa (10-4) -------------------43
24. Utah State (11-3)------------ 116
25. San Diego State (12-2)-------101
Even if you only look at P-5 schools... they aren't all that accurate after the first few. Missing from that list are #5 LSU, #7 UF, #8 TAM, #10 USC, #11 Texas, #13 Miami, #14 Auburn, #16 Penn St, #17 Washington, #18 UNC, #19 UT, #20 FSU, #21 Wisconsin, #22 USCe, #23 Nebraska, #24 UCLA, and #25 Stanford. ONLY 8 of the top 25 have composite talent ranked in the top 25. There are 9 teams outside the top 40 in talent according to 247's composite.
That is just not very accurate.... and serves as evidence that the recruiting sites do indeed depend on watching certain programs to help their "accuracy".
But for the reasons mentioned above... it isn't that accurate. Dabo a few years back found a way to identify talent but the recruiting sites didn't catch on for a while. Eventually, he was competing with Bama with a team that averaged around 11th in the recruiting rankings.
The point is that some hang on to recruiting rankings as if they definitively show who is or is not getting talent. There are a lot of great players who for whatever reason do not get the attention of the recruiting sites.