I think the concepts generally work for me.

by LaFortune Teller , South Bend, Tuesday, July 27, 2010, 09:44 (5797 days ago) @ suave_andrew

And this is a really cool project.

I guess I'll wait for the article to understand the methodology more completely. For instance, the recruiting and schedule ratings are easily grasped and generally well-accepted measures.

Home field advantage ought to be relatively easily understood as well -- depending on the methodology. Personally, I haven't been convinced that the quantifiable differences between best and worst home field advantages are all that dramatic.

The development, game day, and cluck/luck measures make sense, but are also going to be heavily scrutinized depending on the methodology.

Here are a few big questions I have:

1. Are you trying to make a "complete" picture of a team? Or a coach? It seems like the approach you are taking with at least a few of these items is drawing a connection between performance and expectations -- that there are teams/coaches that get more out their raw materials in development and game day performance than they ought to. If this is where you're taking it, are you trying to actually identify areas teams/coaches could concentrate on for improvement, or are you trying to identify the status of a particular team/coach as a way to see through other basic data that might be clouding our judgment? And are there clear distinctions between some of these things, or are there overlaps (between, say, clutch/luck and game day)? And if it's supposed to be complete, is there anything missing?

2. Are the scales important? Are you doing the analysis a disservice by assigning a 1-120 rank for both rather than using the ratings themselves? The difference between #1 and #15 in recruiting, for instance, might be equal to the difference between #1 and #120 in home field advantage. Or it might not. But without that nuance, it makes understanding the complete picture more challenging.

3. I like the use of 5-year comprehensive data for a picture of a program. But I think it is a fairer picture of a program taken at the end of the 5-year period. In other words, when you are making comparisons and drawing conclusions, I think you should be careful about grouping teams that might have had success at opposite ends of that period. Alabama in 2009 was certainly a function of its 2005-09 recruiting, development, game day, etc. But in the same table, is it right to talk about USC in 2005 as a function of its 2005-09 recruiting, development, game day, etc? (Maybe this isn't what you're doing, and maybe that would make this far more challenging to do, but I think 2005 teams should be evaluated on 2001-05 data, 2006 teams on 2002-06 data, etc).