Self-Scouting: Evaluating recent five-star cornerbacks

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Last week and into this week, Rivals.com is taking a look at five-stars at each position from 2012 to 2015 (classes that are now nearly completely out of college football and off to the pros) and how they fared compared to our ranking to determine which spots we got right and which ones we got wrong. We move to cornerbacks.

Iman Marshall, Tarvarus McFadden, Kevin Toliver II, Jabrill Peppers, Marlon Humphrey, Jalen Tabor, Tony Brown, Vernon Hargreaves III, Kendall Fuller, Jalen Ramsey, Tre’Davious White, Tracy Howard

There is a major boom-or-bust feeling when it comes to five-star cornerbacks in recent cycles and it goes even deeper than that since two of the players that went undrafted left early, clearly not a good choice in the longer scheme. Seven of the 12 five-star CBs from 2012 to 2015 were taken in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft (58 percent).

Peppers, Humphrey, Hargreaves, Ramsey and White - three of them playing in the SEC - were all first-round selections. Even though Peppers was ranked as a cornerback, he mainly played safety in college and now in the NFL.

Tabor was a second-round selection who received a lot of chatter as a possible Round 1 guy and then Fuller was taken in the third round, his draft stock plummeting because of a knee injury during his final season at Virginia Tech.

Marshall was drafted in the fourth round of this latest NFL Draft, which feels like a miss since he was the top-ranked cornerback in the 2015 class.

McFadden and Toliver left Florida State and LSU, respectively, after their junior seasons and both went undrafted. Brown, even after an excellent showing at the NFL Combine, went undrafted and had off-field issues during his time at Alabama. Howard also was not drafted and has bounced around from Cleveland to Jacksonville to Miami in recent seasons.

We’ve done quite well at cornerback in recent years. Fuller would have been a first-rounder had he not been injured at Virginia Tech. Hargreaves was a guy I always thought was a bit overrated because of size and he’s struggled in the NFL, but you can’t argue with his college performance and first-round status. Howard is the biggest surprise to me because he was so talented, but Miami isn’t developing players like it used to. But when you look at the first-rounders we ranked as five-stars, I feel pretty good about what we’ve done.