ESPN raises the wrong questions

This article on ESPNBoston is generating a bit of buzz for all the wrong reason. BC guy Brad Zak used the Haden situation to ask "is BC not the place to develop top talent?" I hate to be so blunt -- especially towards a BC guy -- but this is beyond stupid. If you want to measure BC's ability to develop top talent, you should probably use Wins and NFL Draft picks as a measurement, not how some teenage recruit panned out. In fact, Haden's situation should be more of an indictment against the flawed and foolish recruiting rating system so many fans are slaves to. It has been a while since I stated my case about recruiting, so let's use this article and Haden's issues to take another look.

First let me say that recruiting is important. You need good players to win and you need to sell potential recruits on your school. But overlooked in recruiting is eyeing talent. We give too much credit to the evaluators at Rivals, Scout and ESPN. They don't know anything. Sure they have some measurables and if all the big powers are going after a kid, it is probably safe to say he is good. But there are so many other factors in play, that using the recruiting systems as anything definitive is dumb. I always fall back to the NFL. Look how many top picks become total busts even though the NFL teams are able to make more informed decisions when they select their players. You also need to look no further than your real life experiences. If you've ever hired someone or worked in recruiting, you know how challenging it can be. Someone who looks great on paper or was great in job A doesn't always fit with job B. It happens.


Then there is just the unplanned. Who knows what would have become of Toal or Haden if not for injuries? You can't plan on a guy like Montel Harris stepping up and exceeding his recruiting rankings. That is not BC's fault. If Haden transfers and becomes a star at his next stop, I won't use that as an indictment against the staff either. Sometime players develop at different rates. Take Andre Callendar. After his second season, few would have predicted the dominant performance of his senior season.

But don't use my theories or anecdotes to judge the process. Use the recruiting services themselves. Below are the four and five star recruits from Rivals' database going back to 2002.

2002 -- Josh Beekman, Will Blackmon, Shadu Moore, Jeremy Simpson, Jim Unis
2003 -- Dorien Bryant, Andre Callender, Ryan Poles
2004 -- Brandon Robinson, Brian Toal (five star)
2005 -- Andre Jones, Pat Sheil
2006 -- Richard Lapham, Jordon McMichael
2007 -- Corey Eason, John Elliott
2008 -- Mike Goodman, Josh Haden, Okechuckwu Okoroha
2009 -- Dillon Quinn

If you look at this group and their careers, how can you put much weight into the star system producing stars? Some never stepped on campus or left shortly thereafter. Some had unfortunate injury situations and others just weren't that good. What's more interesting are the names that aren't on the list. Where's Matt Ryan, Herzlich, Silva, Tennant, Castanzo, Kuechly, etc?

I am glad ESPNBoston is covering BC but this effort missed the boat. Maybe as a follow up, Zak should ask who is evaluating the evaluators?

Flaws with the recruiting rankings

Skeptics and believers alike should read SMQ’s deep dive on recruiting rankings. [Relevant BC note -- we continue to outperform our recruiting rankings.] He concludes that "the rankings are a serviceable baseline for expectation." I am still in the nonbeliever club.

Although I think there is some value to following recruiting, I remain unemotional about the process. The payoffs are just too far away and there are too many outside factors that impact a program from signing day to the time a player hits the field.

As a public skeptic of the recruiting rankings, let me explain myself a bit. Talent matters. The team with the better talent will win the majority of the time. But I don’t think the rankings are a perfect (or even a very good) measure of talent or a good forecast for on the field results. The pillars of my arguments undermining the rankings follow. As always, let me know what you think in the comments section.


Recent history
The major sites use their consistently high rankings of programs like USC, Oklahoma and LSU as examples of how their system works. This boast ignores the actual timelines of these programs accents. UCS, Oklahoma and LSU all won championships and moved into or returned to elite status with respective coaching changes. Carroll, Stoops and Saban all won early in their tenures with less regarded talent. Once the programs established themselves their recruiting took on positive momentum and the recruiting sites followed. Now, nearly a decade later, it is easy to say “we [Rivals, Scout, Lemming] had USC class of 2003 ranked highly and it produced XX Pac 10 titles and XX first round draft picks.” These same sites never wipe the egg of their face when they could have said “our rankings of the late 90s USC classes never would have forecasted their first Championship under Carroll.” Florida provides another example of coaching versus recruiting rankings and how these sites can luck into their forecasts. Ron Zook was hailed by the recruiting sites for the classes he brought to Florida. His performance on the field left the Gator fans disappointed. Enter Urban Meyer. He wins a national championship in his second season. Recruiting sites boast: “see we knew Florida had talent!” Yet how do they explain Urban Meyer going undefeated at Utah with a bunch of two stars recruits? Or turning around a lightly-regarded Bowling Green earlier in his career? Coaching is the easy explanation. Unfortunately for Rivals and Scout, it doesn’t sell subscriptions. Recruiting news does.

Real life
This is something I didn’t appreciate until I had to make and witness personnel decisions in the business world. Although athletic evaluation is less subjective, when trying to fill roles or hire companies determine criteria for a position and then go and find people for those roles…just like sports (the subjectivity comes when placing a greater weight on personality versus tangible things like size and strength). Even the best companies make mistakes. I am sure anyone reading this who has hired someone has seen the perfect candidate not live up to expectations, while the guy or girl you had doubts about rises to the occasion. Heck, there is even something to be said of coaching someone into his or her role. I am sure readers have seen or developed people to become better than they were or outperform their peers who had better degrees or more experience, etc. Why should we expect things do be different in college sports? Bringing in the people with the best resumes in the business world is a start but doesn’t assure success. Bringing in the most sought after recruits in college football is a start but doesn’t assure success. It is about making them better and fitting the pieces together.

NFL
The NFL has a much more qualified applicant pool from which to draft. They have hundreds of hours of footage of likely draftees playing at a very high level. Collectively they are the best talent evaluators in the sport – yet they get things wrong too. It’s the nature of the process. If the best miss when identifying prospects 30% of the time, why should I expect talent evaluators from the national sites to get it right even 50% of the time. They are dealing with a much wider sample size and trying to forecast a process that has many more variables.

I think the rankings become a self-fulfilling process not a baseline. The sites try to stay ahead of the curve with the supposed measurable but there is a lot of luck, hot air and betting on the right programs and coaches. Any evaluation process is going to be filled with with hits and misses. What Tom Lemming or Mike Farrell thinks doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the coaching staff has a good eye for talent, knows how to sell kids on the school and style of play, makes them better once they get on campus and then gives them the plays to beat the guys across the line of scrimmage.

Did Rivals forget or overrate BC?

Normally I don’t pay too much attention to preseason polls, but growing intrigue about the Rivals preseason Top 50 had me take a closer look.

Rivals is breaking down the Top 50 teams in college football. They release a new team every day. Wednesday’s team was No. 17 Tennessee. There are 16 spots to be revealed and the following teams have not been included yet (I’ve assigned them numbers not as a ranking but just to illustrate how many slots are left):

1. USC
2. LSU
3. Texas
4. Oklahoma
5. Florida
6. Auburn
7. Georgia
8. Ohio State
9. West Virginia
10. Louisville
11. Penn State
12. Michigan
13. Cal
14. Virginia Tech
15. Wisconsin

Those 15 teams are not in the current Rivals rankings but have been in nearly every preseason Top 25 lists. I expect them all to be included in Rivals. That leaves one spot unaccounted for in the Rivals list. Is it BC?

Surprised by a potential high ranking yet concerned about a slight, I looked at other preseason polls and tried to see who else might be missing. Going through Phil Steele’s, Athlon Sports and The Sporting News’ preseason magazines, only two other programs appear in anyone’s Top 50 that are not accounted for in Rivals list. Those schools, Southern Miss and Utah, do not appear anywhere near as high as Top 16. In these same publications, BC is ranked 28th in the Sporting News, 27th in Athlon, and 41st** in Phil Steele’s.

It looks like BC is going to be in Rivals Top 16. I’d be encouraged by the enthusiasm but it will certainly draw some criticism from other fan groups. For Rivals sake I hope BC is in their Top 16, because excluding them would be sloppy. Working on the blogpoll and now at the FanHouse, I understand how a (presumably) collaborative list like this could have a mistake or two, but omitting BC would be bad. Sure BC has a new head coach, however, this year’s team returns the majority of its starters and has two veteran, respected coordinators. We are arguably a Top 25 team and a definite Top 50 team.

I’ve had problems with certain Rivals subsites in the past, so nothing would shock me at this point. Since all of these rankings are just about perception and offseason water cooler talk, part of me hopes for exclusion. A slap like that would give Jags some really good bulletin board material for summer practices. Either way, Rivals unorthodox Top 50 has done the one thing their editors wanted – got people talking.

UPDATE: As reader Brian pointed out, Steele did not have BC in his Top 50, however, Steele covers his ass hedges by ranking BC 41 in his Power Ranking.