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Applying the Moneyball Concept to College Football Recruiting

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aledyard's picture
December 29, 2017 at 2:27pm
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I have often felt that college football recruiting rankings are an inexact science and fraught with inconsistencies and biases. I order to test my theory, I examined which states have the most NFL players in the years 2016, 2013, and 2011, computed the averages for each state, and then ranked them.  My thought was that making it to the NFL is the ultimate test of a state’s ability to produce top football talent.  The top 20 states and their respective averages are:
CA – 212, FL – 186, TX – 179, GA – 92, OH – 83, LA – 69, PA – 61, NJ – 58, AL – 53, SC – 52, MI – 50, VA – 49, NC – 46, IL – 38, TN – 35, NY – 32, MS – 30, MD – 27, MO – 26, and WI – 25.  Next, I took the 2 year averages for the number of ESPN 300 Players (2017 and 2018) for each of the top 20 NFL producing states.  Here’s what each state produced:  FL – 53, TX – 44, GA – 35, CA – 32, AL – 12, LA – 12, TN – 10, OH – 9, PA – 9, NC – 7, NJ – 7, MD – 7, MI – 6, VA – 6, MS – 5, SC – 4, IL – 4, MO – 3, NY – 2, and WI – 1.  

If the ESPN 300 rankings were to represent an accurate measure of a state’s ability to produce to football talent, I would have expected those rankings to mirror the results of top NFL producing states.  By and large, this was not the case at all.  California, which has consistently produced more NFL players than any other state, is fourth when it comes to the ESPN 300 rankings.  Another glaring inconsistency is with New York, which produces the 16th most NFL players, but ranks 30th when it comes to ESPN 300 rankings.  

The next step I took was to assign a “value index” to players from each state by dividing the average number of NFL players for each state by the average ESPN 300 players from each state.  The higher the value, the more underrated the players are from that state, the lower the value, the more overrated the players are estimated to be.  Again, looking at the top 20 NFL producing states, here are the values from highest to lowest:  WI – 25, NY – 21, SC – 15, IL – 11, MO – 10, OH – 9, NJ – 9, VA – 9, MI – 8, PA – 7, CA – 7, NC – 7, MS – 7, LA – 6, AL – 4, TX – 4, MD – 4, TN – 4, FL – 4, and GA – 3.

So what do these results mean?  Well, I think for one the recruiting services spend a lot of time identifying recruits in the Southeast, which is why these states tend to have more recruits in the ESPN 300.  Additionally, I think the West coast and Northeast are generally overlooked areas for football recruits and college football in general.  I think this was evidenced by USC’s snub from even being in the discussion of the college football playoff this year.  For the Buckeyes, I think this data could be used to assign values to recruits from each state, kind of like money-ball for college football recruiting.  As an example, when coaches identify recruits from states like Georgia and Florida, a cautionary value could be assigned to these players because players from these states are perceived to be “overvalued” by recruiting services.  I also think this data could be very useful to smaller market schools in identifying undervalued recruits

 

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