Recruiting Insights Week 10

[tsweezy]

Whew, what a signing bonanza we had last night. Lots of recruits committed, but most of those were committing to the only school on them and the projected rankings kind of assumed that would happen so there isn't a huge shakeup this week. I think next week as the points get allocated slightly differently we will see a lot more shakeup here. In any case on to the explanation!

 

Instead of expected stars to grade the class, I have given each player a "rating" which should be an estimate of how good they will be as a Junior. This takes into account their overall and star rating for initial rating, and a theoretical progression over 2 years based on potential. This should hopefully strike a balance between high potential players who may end up really good, but only for a year or 2 vs. instant contributors with a lower ceiling. For some ballpark ranges, 5 stars are around 50-55 points, 4 stars and good 3 stars are around 40-50 and an "average" 3 star recruit is 38 or 39 points.

 

To get the overall score, just add up the players you're in solo lead for plus 40% of the stars you're in a battle for (so if you're the only name on a 4 star, a 3 star, and battling for a 5 star you get 9 expected stars) .

 

In addition, this week I am adding the number of recruits a school is involved with in red, to show how some teams are doing well because of the number of recruits they're involved on, and give a little bit of a look as to how good their "average" recruit might be.

 

 

Interestingly, this week has by far the strongest correlation between score and number of recruits. Obviously there is expected to be a strong correlation since leading on more recruits will give you a higher score. Distance above or below the red dot should be a good proxy for "average" recruit in the class (if a school has a class score below the red dot then on average they are signing slightly below average recruits. Of course it's also easier to sign only above average recruits if you're only aiming at a few). In any case there is a shakeup at the top as Kansas continues to fall back to earth a little bit and Kentucky takes over the top slot! After those 2 there's the same grouping as there has been for the last few weeks. Again, I expect each successive week to shake up more and more of the right half of this chart.

 

Moving on, thanks in part to Kentucky, the conference averages have skewed even more heavily to the SEC.

Lastly, the last time we checked the number of affinities really didn't affect a team's class that much. This week's numbers however show that the 1-affinity schools are doing way better than others.

 

Number of Affinities	Number of teams	Expected Stars	Number of recruits all alone on
0	27	630.8666667	14.96296296
1	13	759.7846154	17.53846154
2	17	646.2705882	15.05882353
3	7	512.7142857	11.85714286

 

Thoughts on why this is? Who knows. But the triple schools doing the worst is very surprising.