College Football Christmas–aka National Signing Day–is upon us again. This is the time of year when fans across the country have their best hopes and worst fears realized as recruits flip between rival programs like salmon between bears. Although theoretically the balance between pleasant surprise and crushing disappointment on this day should be exactly even, the angriest voices are always the loudest, and every year fans of teams that underperform in recruiting rankings attempt to discredit the rankings altogether. Star ratings, they say, are not good indicators of talent. After all, it seems that every year highly touted favorites fail to perform and no-star recruits become, well, star players. It is tempting to think that the hype surrounding Signing Day is unwarranted. It is tempting to think that offseason drama doesn’t have a big impact on what happens on the field six months later. The notion that recruiting rankings are not predictive of success is attractive because the alternative is the scary idea that college football outcomes are largely predetermined.
Recruiting Rankings are Accurate Useful
Fortunately, it seems that every season brings us more anecdotal evidence suggesting that star ratings are not predictive. Underdog stories are appealing. Not only are they personally inspiring, but they provide hope to fans of teams with low recruiting power — so when a two star recruit wins the Heisman or becomes an NFL All-Pro, we often hear about it. Conversely, we usually hear about five and four star players before they set foot on the field, so we notice when they fail to produce. This is how the exceptions become the rule in the public consciousness. It is also unhelpful that many interpret star rankings as predictors of NFL success. They are not, and even if they were, high school scouts can be excused for failing to foresee how good a high school player will be when he enters the draft 3-5 years down the line. Imagine handing out draft grades based solely on high school film and stats. Yeah.
So while those articles about the number of blue chip recruits on the two super bowl rosters might not be very informative, we can learn something about our ability to identify player talent by examining how ratings correspond to college productivity. We could do this by tracing how ratings are associated with individual production, but as with the NFL Draft, you can define “hits” and “misses” in many different ways, and I am not interested in arbitrating that. I’ll let you decide whether these guys panned out.
The College Football Caste System
It is probably more important to look at how class rankings impact team success in simple terms of wins and losses. A brief perusal of recent rankings is enough to identify an association. Two years ago, Matt Hinton divided FBS teams into five tiers based on the average star rating of their classes from the previous few years, then compared the winning percentages of each tier against the other four. The results were extremely intuitive. From 2010-2013, teams in the top tier won 67.9% of their games, posting progressively more dominant winning percentages against teams with inferior recruiting. The second and third tier also feasted on lesser recruiters, which is significant because it means that the predictivity of rankings applies equally to high and low levels of football. View the table here, or read Hinton’s full article here.
There is clearly a hierarchy of programs in the modern college football landscape, but with the way elite teams schedule their seasons it might be more accurate to describe it as a food chain, with the lower three tiers serving as prey for the top dogs. This leads us to believe that outcomes in college football are indeed largely predetermined, although upsets are always bound to occur. There is a popular coaching mantra that games are won in the offseason, but they might actually be decided long before that.
Still, there are a few exceptional programs that frustrate our ability to predict outcomes, teams that regularly overachieve or underperform based on their level of talent. Kansas State is famous for winning consistently despite very poor recruiting — they always get stomped by better teams in bowl season. Then there are the sleeping giants, the USC’s and Texas’s of the world. These teams possess elite talent but often fail to even contend for their conference. The obvious missing factor here is coaching. Raw talent needs to be given a certain degree of form before it can be useful. But this raises the question of exactly what defines a good college coach, since unlike in the NFL, college coaches are responsible for acquiring talent as well as developing it.
Nick Saban Cares
Some would argue that coaching is even more important to team success than roster talent. There is some merit to this argument. We already know that talented rosters can underperform in the absence of quality coaching, and history provides us with many examples of good coaches resurrecting struggling programs. Gary Patterson at TCU. Urban Meyer at Utah. Steve Spurrier anywhere. However, we have also seen that this process can sometimes be lengthy. Michigan State was a mediocre Big 10 team in its first three years under Mark Dantonio before breaking out in 2011 and establishing itself as a national power in 2013. But only in the last three years of Spartan football have we seen significant improvements in recruiting. Dantonio cracked Scout’s top 25 classes for the first time in 2014, posted similar results last year, and could finish with a top ten class in 2016, depending on what transpires today.
That Dantonio was able to compete for Big 10 championships with such poor recruiting is even more impressive for the fact that the majority of programs, even those with highly regarded coaches, depend on improved recruiting to sustain success. Jim Harbaugh took over a drowning Stanford program in 2007, recruited his first five star in 2008, and brought home top 25 classes thereafter. Now with his first season at Michigan behind him, he could very easily finish with a top three class. In a sense, Harbaugh is the ideal college head coach. He can maximize the production of whatever talent he has, but he is also a prolific and personally aggressive recruiter. Though their approaches differ from Harbaugh’s, Nick Saban and Urban Meyer have built dynasties founded on extremely efficient and consistent recruiting machines.
There are those who cling to the idea that correlation is not causation, that elite programs do not win because they recruit well, but rather they recruit well because they win, and thus class rankings become self-fulfilling prophecies. Others claim that scouting services tend to give more generous ratings to players that grow up near or are targeted by major programs.
But if it were true that recruiting is significantly overvalued and that success is more attributable to coaching and administration, then I would have to question why coaches and administrators are perpetually in desperate pursuit of recruits. I would question why millionaire coaches and coordinators spend much of their time driving or flying across the country in an attempt to get 17 year olds-and their mothers-to like them.
Here is a picture of Nick Saban dabbing with a five star linebacker.
Everybody been waiting on this!!!! Now who the livest coach in America🇺🇸 ?? #RollTide pic.twitter.com/WS0tJOlz8f
— Feb The Month ✍ (@Iam__MW3) January 24, 2016
That man has five championship rings and millions in the bank but shoot, he’ll Nae Nae on your coffee table if it means a soft verbal.
College coaches are typically incurable workaholics, certainly, so it’s not surprising that they would strive to gain every advantage within reach, but the universities and boosters also have stakes in program success, and they typically go to great financial lengths to tempt recruits and thus secure the future of the program. Suffice it to say that teams aren’t switching up their uniforms just for Nike money.
This is a huge day in college football for reasons that transcend hype and fan happiness. Today, a few dozen 17-19 year olds are going to achieve fame by commodifying their athleticism for the first and hopefully not the last time. Beyond that, their choices will change the fortunes of multi-million dollar corporations and allow a billion dollar industry to perpetuate, because the inescapable and disturbing truth is that everything in college football ultimately stems from these players and their decision to participate. Recruiting, like football itself, is intensely competitive, often ethically suspect, and never really fair. It is important for observers of the game to keep the nature and significance of recruiting in mind while we watch today’s events and future seasons unfold.
And if you’re a recruit, don’t trust every coach that knocks on your door. If you let Jim Harbaugh take you out for a fancy dinner, he’s going to have expectations.
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