Making the best of recruits

[zanycat]

Interesting article that compares how much better or worse each school fared in 2014 compared with how its recruiting predicted that it would finish. Also has analysis for each season since 2005 to see which programs are habitually over- or underachieving.

FiveThirtyEight article

 

[TheC]

I wonder where we'd be if they'd done this two years ago.

 

[catlitter]

Even with the (slight/ 5-3) abberation of two years ago, this supports my contention in a post below where I asked why anyone would consider this a "great" recruitng class. It's ranked 11th in the B10. Over the last several years our recruiting classes have consitantly been ranked in the bottom half of the B10, and that is, generally, where NU has ranked in B10 wins and losses. The article posted by zanycat supports that NU ends up about where expected, given its recruiting rankings.

 

[Gladeskat]

Originally posted by catlitter:

Even with the (slight/ 5-3) abberation of two years ago, this supports my contention in a post below where I asked why anyone would consider this a "great" recruitng class. It's ranked 11th in the B10. Over the last several years our recruiting classes have consitantly been ranked in the bottom half of the B10, and that is, generally, where NU has ranked in B10 wins and losses. The article posted by zanycat supports that NU ends up about where expected, given its recruiting rankings.

That's not what I see, and that's not what the second graph shows. We may finish near the bottom in recruiting, but we finish, on average, near the middle in the Big Ten in wins and losses. We have the ninth best improvement over our recruiting rankings. If anything is an abberration it is the 1-7 record for 2013 and 2-6 record in 2006. We had 5 win seasons in 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2012,

I do agree with one thing, though, and that's the tendency of our fans to overestimate the quality of our recruiting classes. They praise Fitz year after year for landing great classes, but we produce very few players with the talent to play in the NFL. And I don't blame this discrepancy entirely on poor development.



This post was edited on 2/4 8:44 PM by Gladeskat