No. And I don't find the subject matter sufficiently interesting, important, or, frankly, debatable for me to seek one out.
It's obvious that talent has a strong positive correlation to team outcomes, however one chooses to define that. I assume you agree with that. The question then is whether and to what extent Rivals' rankings accurately reflects talent. To which I answer, somewhat; certainly better than chance.
Let's engage in a little thought experiment. Imagine two teams. Both teams can have their pick of all the HS seniors. Both teams will keep their recruits for 4 years, and because of that, both teams will take exactly three recruits each year. Lets further assume that both teams have the same level of coaching, OK? Imagine that each year, team 1 signs the #1 pg, the #1 C/PF, and the #1 wing. And each year, team 2 signs no one in the Rivals top 100. After 4 years, the two teams play. Team 1 has the #1 PG four years in a row, #1 C/PF four years in a row, and the #1 wing four years in a row. Team 2 has no player in the top 100. Which team would you rather have? Assuming equal coaching, how many times would team 2 beat team 1? 1 out of 30? 1 out of 50? 1 out of 100? Something like that, right? Can you really say that you believe otherwise?
So, I think its just obvious that talent matters and that rankings at least somewhat reflect talent. Completely obvious. The question then comes to how could your study come to any other conclusion. It's must be flawed, but how? First thing I want to point out is that just cause a study appears in a peer reviewed journal, doesn't mean its true...depending on the subject matter of the study, it doesn't seem to even be more likely true than not, for more on this, see the work of John Ioannides:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
More specifically though, your study has a bunch of problems: needlessly creating categorical data through the use of quartiles, confining the response variable to brief tournament appearances, and they may be overly aggressive with multiple comparison adjustments.
The thing to remember is that the study does not say that rankings have no predictive value; it says they couldn't find sufficient evidence that rankings have predictive value. Right? If they had really wanted to, they would have found it. They could done a different study. They could have taken out the quartiles and just done a straight analysis reflecting the number of ranked players on each team, the ranking of such players, and the minutes played by those players compared to team KenPom or Sagarin ratings. But they didn't.
Anyway, this is much too much about something that just isn't that important. I like your passion Dan and I like to read your posts, but just stop linking this study
. It's not worth it.