For the most part, I think recruiting star rankings are overblown. College success is far more about development and schemes than recruiting hyped high school players. Looking at the Pac-12 for example, Stanford and Oregon always finish higher in the actual football rankings at the end of each year than they do in the recruiting rankings, while USC and UCLA are the opposite.
Does this mean that USC and UCLA are more talented than Oregon or Stanford? Perhaps they are more talented in terms of how those players did when in high school, but being good in high school and being good in college are two very different things. It's the same thing in the NFL. If we simply looked at how good each NFL teams players were in college, then the Cleveland Browns would be a dynasty.
This is why coaching is so huge. You put Nick Saban at Oregon State or Colorado and he'd be threatening 10+ wins by year two if not sooner. Urban Meyer hit the ground sprinting at each of his coaching stops, and so has Jim Harbaugh. They didn't need to recruit top five recruiting classes and wait 4 years first.
I don't think Chris Petersen is in the same league as those guys. I think Petersen is borderline tier one, alongside guys like Steve Spurrier, Bobby Petrino, Art Briles and Gary Patterson. But what I do like about Peterson that reminds a little of Pete Carroll is that he doesn't care where other people rank his prospects because he believes he can mold them into good players. Even with the Huskies on the rise, Petersen is still courting a lot of 3 star players. Sark was more about recruiting big name guys and hoping for the best. Petersen seems to be more about targeting his kind of players and coaching them up.