Ongoing recruiting project

by suave_andrew, Sunday, June 13, 2010, 12:04 (5841 days ago)

I've been working on an ongoing project to better explain the extent of the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the recruiting rankings from rivals and scout. I've always felt that people invest way too much stock in the rankings, but I have to admit the correlation is better than I thought it would be.

Here's a slight macro look at what I have for rivals so far, I thought it was pretty interesting:

Notes:
* Red markers are teams that have won national championships in the 2002-2009 time period
* Total win % = total wins from 2002 through 2009 divided by total games played
* Boise St, TCU, Utah, and Duke are the most egregious outliers

I think the best explanation of why the regression line straightens out in the middle is because that's where the top teams in the low conference and the worst teams in the big conferences start mixing their recruiting rankings. It might be worthwhile to run two separate studies for BCS conference teams and non BCS conference teams.

The next step is to look at scout, and then both scout and rivals combined.

Any suggestions on what else to look at?

Tags:
charts, recruiting