Interesting ESPN article (Peter Keating) on recruit rankings:
DURING THE PAST YEAR, the past year, colleges have spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours scouting high school football players, breaking them down on film, ranking them on secret lists, feting them with parties and hostesses and luring them with scholarship offers. On Feb. 1, national signing day, we'll get to see which programs did the best job in their recruiting. What could be more fun? If your favorite school lands the best athletes in the country, it will lead to years of bowl victories and contending for national championships, right?
Not so fast, my friends. New research shows that the connection between landing top preps and winning games is shockingly weak -- so much so that fans should rethink how they judge a coach's recruiting efforts.
Four major services rate football recruits on a scale of one to five stars: ESPN, Rivals, Scout and 24/7 Sports. Sometimes these rankings differ, but there's usually at least a rough consensus among the services about most players. This year, for example, they all agree that safety Landon Collins, receivers Stefon Diggs and Dorial Green-Beckham, defensive tackle Eddie Goldman and quarterback Gunner Kiel are among the game's best prospects.
But getting any of them to sign a letter of intent doesn't guarantee much. Winthrop Intelligence, a college sports research outfit, recently analyzed every recruiting class from 2006 to 2010, tracking how more than 11,000 prep stars affected their college programs' success. Winthrop found no correlation between the number of recruits with three or more stars on an FBS team and its subsequent winning percentages. "We checked more than 100 performance statistics, including points, yards and touchdowns," the company writes in a report. "We found no significant relationship between higher-ranked recruiting classes and better performance statistics."
Why? Kevin Barefoot, Winthrop's director of marketing, offers one obvious explanation: "Talent evaluation is subjective," he says. I'll offer another reason: There's no sure path from prowess to greatness for teenage athletes. Lots of players stop developing physically in college, while others get injured or lose motivation or transfer to other schools. Last year, The Mag looked at players who had been the No. 1 high school recruit in the country in the past 25 years. The list included a few players who proceeded to dominate in college, such as Vince Young and Ted Ginn Jr., but it also included a couple of flameouts like Xavier Crawford, Marquette Smith, Randy Fasani and Kyle Wright.
So if the quality of recruits doesn't determine a program's success, what does? Well, D. Shane Miller, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, recently compared winning percentages for major-conference teams with the average ranking of their recruiting classes since 2008. Like Winthrop, Miller found a weak overall correlation, but he also discovered that certain programs do seem to over- or underachieve given what they have to work with. Kansas State, for example, exceeded expectations more than any other school, while Ole Miss underperformed most drastically. Miller thinks that's largely because of coaching. As he puts it: "No one should ever hire Houston Nutt."
Entire article:
http://m.espn.go.com/ncf/story?storyId=7494471&lang=ES&wjb=
Bottom line: Some coaches are better than others at identifying talented players suited for their systems and molding their skills, whatever the star system says. In the past four years, for example, Texas' recruits rated higher than Boise State's, Florida State's higher than Oklahoma State's. But the Broncos and Cowboys have combined for an .867 winning percentage versus .685 for the Longhorns and Seminoles. And the impact of coaching extends beyond the confines of Saturday's playing fields. From 2006 to 2010, Frank Beamer of Virginia Tech and Brian Kelly of Cincinnati and Notre Dame each coached 15 players who received two stars or fewer as recruits; the NFL later drafted all of them.
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It turns out coaching is really about coaching, not recruiting.
