By Zachary Armstrong
If you have ever spent anytime on a recruiting or college football message board you have heard two sides to this question. One side will tell you that the ranking system in place by Rivals or Scouts is overrated and doesn’t matter to a team’s success. The other side will tell you that it does matter and is a direct correlation to a team’s future success. Having heard both sides I decided to do a little research of my own to determine which one is true.
Most football fans will agree that juniors and seniors carry a football team in college football. To see how effective Rival's rankings are I decided to look at the recruiting classes of 2003 and 2004 because these years would make up the juniors and seniors for the 2006 college football season. Florida, the 2006 national champion, had an average class ranking of 3 according to Rivals. Many will say that Florida also had many freshman that helped them win it all this year and that freshman class was ranked 2nd by rivals. Ohio State, who played Florida in the national championship game, had an average ranking of 25. However, that is a bit skewed due to Ohio State having limited scholarships in 2003. The average recruit ranking was 11th in the country in 2003 in which they finished 41st overall. Ohio State also had many 5th year seniors from a class that was ranked 5th by Rivals.
Many experts and football fans considered LSU and USC the most talented teams of 2006. LSU had the best class of 2003 and the 2nd best class in 2004. USC had the 3rd best recruiting class of 2003 and the best class of 2004. These teams finished 3rd and 4th in the final AP poll.
The average rank of the recruiting class of the top 25, AP poll, for 2003 and 2004 is 32.94. Teams such as Boise State and BYU bring this average down. Taking out the three lowest ranked classes from 2003 and 2004 you get an average class ranking of 24.7. Out of the final top 25, AP poll, only 10 teams never had a top 25 recruiting class in 2003 or 2004 and only 3 teams never had a top 50 recruiting class in 2003 or 2004.
There were two things during this research that I found very interesting. The first was how many teams finished within 4 spots of one of class rankings from 2003 or 2004. Eleven teams finished within 4 spots of their class ranking during those years. The next thing I found very interesting was that the BCS conferences had only one team, Wake Forest, finish in the top 25 with an average recruiting class over 50. In fact the average recruiting class rank for teams that finished in the top 25, AP poll, from BCS conferences is 23 for 2003 and 2004.
After looking at all of these facts it is apparent to me that class rankings do matter to a team’s future success. While there will be teams that finish in the top 25 without having a great class it isn’t of common theme. After looking at the data one would think it would be almost impossible for a team from a BCS conference to finish in the top 25 without some kind of success in recruiting.
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5 comments:
I really think there's some give and take here with your point. While the football factories continue to churn out good classes, a lot of their recruits get bumped higher the instant they get an offer. A 3-star player becomes a 4-star, for instance... and the opposite on many other recruits who commit elsewhere.
I think the class rankings tend to be accurate, but not the individuals. Then again, its easy to go thru, look at commits, and say LSU has the #1 class, UF #2, OSU #3, USC #4, etc. There's a fantastic chance that those rankings will play out on the field.
I'd be curious to go through the Rivals100 for the past 5-7 years, and see what percentage of those guys panned out to be as good as projected.
I'd be curious to go through the Rivals100 for the past 5-7 years, and see what percentage of those guys panned out to be as good as projected
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I would be interested in seeing this also.
I always felt the development of those players was more important than the class ranking...? If recruiting class ranking was so important, you'd see the same 5-10 teams on top all the time.... and I don't think you'd see mid majors getting into these BCS Bowl games..
good article tho...
If we are to make something from the correlation of recruiting to success as defined by polls, we should compare it to something. Is recruiting correlation no better than success breeds success. To answer that question we should study whether the correlation between recruiting success is greater than the correlation to just the relatively simple question of how did you do last year. Maybe I will undetake some sort of comparison...
OK, Zach I have done the study and found some surprises. Given the limitation of the AP poll only going to the top 25, I used the Billingsley ratings so I could correlate recruiting for 116 teams against the rankings of those teams in Billingsley.
First, there is a strong positive correlation between 03-04 recruiting rankings and the 2006 rankings with a coeffiecient of 0.589126163. However, your assumption that the most telling recruiting period would be those from which the 2006 Jr. Sr players would come from, with which I agreed, , is not borne out by the data.
The correlation between the recruiting average rank for 2003-2006 is greater than just the 2003-04 period with a coeffiecient of 0.638540178. Not statistically significant but counter to your theory. The greatest correlations to the 2006 final rankings for a 2 year recruiting period was the most recent 2 years recruiting ranking(2005 and 06)with a coefficient of 0.655284186.
As I wondered in my initial response the correlation between success last year to this year is greater than any recruiting ranking correlation with a correlation coefficient of 0.735960637.
Thought I would share.
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