Fort Lauderdale, Fla. ? Let’s pretend you’re a great high school physics student. You’re bright. You’re involved. You’re a whiz on science projects. Does that mean someone halfway across the country, who has no credentials and you’ve never met, can credibly rank you as the 12th-best student in America?

Or say you’re a talented tuba player. Man, you can hit those low notes. How would you feel if someone listened to your tape, talked to a couple of music teachers and decided you’re the 23rd best marching-band musician in the land?

Would you put any stock in it?

And should anyone else?

So why do so many people treat like gospel the rankings of high school football players and college classes on National Signing Day? Is it naivete? Or blind hope? Do these people need a college-football fix in early February that badly?

This may sound strange from someone in the newspaper business, but this is the time where the cliche is true: You can’t believe everything that’s written in the paper. Because just as it would be for science students or tuba players, it’s impossible for some “expert” or “guru” or “analyst” to rank high school players and decide which college teams recruited best.

Maybe it’s simply America’s obsession with lists. One magazine’s “50 Sexiest Men” is another’s “12 Greatest Vacation Spots” is Wednesday’s “Top 25 Recruiting Classes.”

Every year more and more people are making less and less sense on signing day. Recruiting hotlines are set up at schools. The Internet has sites tripping over themselves. ESPN has top-ranked kids signing live on TV and lists the team rankings from its “expert,” Tom Lemming, who was a postal worker before catching this wave.

A postal worker! And now he’s crowning February champions! Is this a great country or what?

No doubt Lemming works hard. No doubt others do, too. But there are tens of thousands of high school players and hundreds of great high school ones. How can anyone pretend to know all of them?

Answer: Louis Holmes.

The Dillard High defensive end signed with Ohio State on Wednesday despite making no recruiting list, no Internet site and being the focus of no fan hotline. By all recruiting protocol, he was a nobody. Yet Ohio State coaches obviously saw enough to give him a scholarship.

In many respects, Holmes is the counter-image to the hoax Bob Knight pulled a few years ago. Tired of the hoopla over basketball recruiting and believing the “experts” were shams, Knight made up the name of a recruit while at Indiana.

Said the kid could play. Had all the tools. And he wanted him badly. Then Knight sat back and watched as Mr. Make-believe became a hot name on recruiting lists. And this is basketball, where the pool of recruits is much smaller than in football.