UM Football Recruiting - by WM Wolverine

[Jeff Buchanan]

Great job, as usual, WM.

Re Reeves/Dunn ..... I agree with you that we should take nothing with regard to the issue of closing skills HtH between Hokeattison and ufm.

[entropy]

This story appears in the Feb. 6, 2012 "Recruiting Issue" of ESPN The Magazine. Subscribe today!

DURING THE PAST YEAR, the past year, colleges have spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours scouting high school football players, breaking them down on film, ranking them on secret lists, feting them with parties and hostesses and luring them with scholarship offers. On Feb. 1, national signing day, we'll get to see which programs did the best job in their recruiting. What could be more fun? If your favorite school lands the best athletes in the country, it will lead to years of bowl victories and contending for national championships, right?

Not so fast, my friends. New research shows that the connection between landing top preps and winning games is shockingly weak -- so much so that fans should rethink how they judge a coach's recruiting efforts.

Four major services rate football recruits on a scale of one to five stars: ESPN, Rivals, Scout and 24/7 Sports. Sometimes these rankings differ, but there's usually at least a rough consensus among the services about most players. This year, for example, they all agree that safety Landon Collins, receivers Stefon Diggs and Dorial Green-Beckham, defensive tackle Eddie Goldman and quarterback Gunner Kiel are among the game's best prospects.

But getting any of them to sign a letter of intent doesn't guarantee much. Winthrop Intelligence, a college sports research outfit, recently analyzed every recruiting class from 2006 to 2010, tracking how more than 11,000 prep stars affected their college programs' success. Winthrop found no correlation between the number of recruits with three or more stars on an FBS team and its subsequent winning percentages. "We checked more than 100 performance statistics, including points, yards and touchdowns," the company writes in a report. "We found no significant relationship between higher-ranked recruiting classes and better performance statistics."

Why? Kevin Barefoot, Winthrop's director of marketing, offers one obvious explanation: "Talent evaluation is subjective," he says. I'll offer another reason: There's no sure path from prowess to greatness for teenage athletes. Lots of players stop developing physically in college, while others get injured or lose motivation or transfer to other schools. Last year, The Mag looked at players who had been the No. 1 high school recruit in the country in the past 25 years. The list included a few players who proceeded to dominate in college, such as Vince Young and Ted Ginn Jr., but it also included a couple of flameouts like Xavier Crawford, Marquette Smith, Randy Fasani and Kyle Wright.

So if the quality of recruits doesn't determine a program's success, what does? Well, D. Shane Miller, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, recently compared winning percentages for major-conference teams with the average ranking of their recruiting classes since 2008. Like Winthrop, Miller found a weak overall correlation, but he also discovered that certain programs do seem to over- or underachieve given what they have to work with. Kansas State, for example, exceeded expectations more than any other school, while Ole Miss underperformed most drastically. Miller thinks that's largely because of coaching. As he puts it: "No one should ever hire Houston Nutt."

Bottom line: Some coaches are better than others at identifying talented players suited for their systems and molding their skills, whatever the star system says. In the past four years, for example, Texas' recruits rated higher than Boise State's, Florida State's higher than Oklahoma State's. But the Broncos and Cowboys have combined for an .867 winning percentage versus .685 for the Longhorns and Seminoles. And the impact of coaching extends beyond the confines of Saturday's playing fields. From 2006 to 2010, Frank Beamer of Virginia Tech and Brian Kelly of Cincinnati and Notre Dame each coached 15 players who received two stars or fewer as recruits; the NFL later drafted all of them.

It's fun to see where the best prep players in the country decide to go to college. But schools recruit like crazy because they like to collect baubles and because their rivals recruit like crazy, not because there's any demonstrable benefit to doing so. The emerging research says we'd do better to evaluate programs by how they develop talent, not how they find it.

It turns out coaching is really about coaching, not recruiting.

Peter Keating is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. Follow The Mag on Twitter, @ESPNmag,

[Jeff Buchanan]

whodean.. interesting article. it would be interesting to seen the Class rankings over the last 10 years and the teams records associated with those classes.

imo, recruiting rankings are less than interesting. Coaching, recruiting for system, building a team chemistry, physical development and believing in the scheme are just as, if not more important.

There is something to that position E but I've learned from others who are a lot more knowledgeable than I am on the impact of recruiting talented HS players (or not) on playing winning football.

You have to have it unless you are satisfied with coming in 2nd or 3rd all the time.

[The Oracle]

whodean.. interesting article. it would be interesting to seen the Class rankings over the last 10 years and the teams records associated with those classes.

imo, recruiting rankings are less than interesting. Coaching, recruiting for system, building a team chemistry, physical development and believing in the scheme are just as, if not more important.

Been done many times and there's a strong correlation between recruiting rankings and how teams perform. There's always exceptions, but as a whole recruiting rankings matter.

[iam416]

If Diamond commits UM will have 9 of the top 20 of ESPN's Midwest recruits.

This was almost going to be something -- until the ESPN part. :-) They're knuckleheads. Scout has their final top whatever for the Midwest out. Gimme a sec....

[iam416]

Dunn was always a Buckeye, never flipped to being committed to M though he likely was leaning that way pre Urban... Disappointing but can be overcome with one really good signing in '13...

Also -- while Dunn didn't officially "flip" -- he was all but gone. I think M's "insiders" would say the same thing as OSU "insiders" on this. But, to his credit, I think he waited to make it "official" until he was 100% sure. I guess we're still saying mostly the same thing. And, yes, M will get a good RB in 2013.

[SeanB]

In all the nonsense that can be recruiting, I thought Dunn handled himself very maturely. Even though he eventually chose the bucks, there was never any "limelight" behavior on his part, from what I could tell. He bided his time, made his visits, and ultimatley made his choice. I can respect that.

Now I just hope our DLine and LBs bury him every chance they get!

[iam416]

Scout's Midwest 150: http://recruiting.scout.com/3/2012_fb_midwest_150.html

[whodean]

Scout's Midwest 150: http://recruiting.scout.com/3/2012_fb_midwest_150.html

So Diamond would make it 9 of the top 24 in Scout's rankings.

[DennisT]

Shaq Thompson to Washington I'm seeing in the Seattle Times.

[entropy]

Been done many times and there's a strong correlation between recruiting rankings and how teams perform. There's always exceptions, but as a whole recruiting rankings matter.

article I posted above disagrees.. explain Texas the last 2 years if it was about recruiting? Explain OSU..

it's more. having 7 5 stars who can't get along does you no good.

[entropy]

and.. Bo (your Bo) would agree with me.... i suspect

[entropy]

from a guy I know who went to Law School at Michigan:

The best analysis of recruiting I've ever heard Bo Schembechler told me when I interviewed him in 1989. He said out of any recruiting class

1/3rd will be complete misses/busts for a variety of reasons (injuries, grades, lack of ability or work, behavior)

1/3rd will be real solid players/difference makers (multi year starters, a few getting conference or national honors perhaps)

What separates an average recruiting class from either a poor one or a very good one is the middle 1/3rd. If they are mostly contributors--one year starters, 2-3 year solid contributors, etc... then you had a very good recruiting class.

If they are mostly non-contributors--never started, only on team a couple of years before leaving, etc....you probably had a poor recruiting class.

So they key to those classes is to rank the best players to the worst non-contributors, divide the list into thirds, and analyze the middle third.

[entropy]

That middle third is more than stars.. it's about the rest of what I discussed.

[Rocky Bleier]

Sam Webb talking about a possible surprise recruit.

https://twitter.com/samwebb77