The recruiting analysis effort we have undertaken over the past couple months resulted in quite a few questions/comments from our readers. We hope to answer some of these questions and give you a little insight behind decisions that went into this analysis. I will be up front and tell you that the goal of this project was to evaluate overall recruiting classes and coaching staff recruiting strategies.
"Experts": The critics at Scout.com and Rivals.com-we feel as though the best equalizer in looking at recruiting items is to go to these guys, as they (a) have an existing star system used for ranking players & (b) they see/rank players all over the country and take their jobs seriously. Yes there are others out there who are very qualified to be experts but due to time constraints we were only able to incorporate these sources into our analysis.
We made no attempt to separate the qualifiers from the non-qualifiers for several reasons:
- 1. The objective is to evaluate the actual recruiting process. We want to know who signed with whom and what the "experts" thought of these signees.
- 2. Recruiting involves lots of resources and resource utilization is an important part in a coach's recruiting strategy. Decisions about qualifiers and non-qualifiers are pertinent to resource management. Wasted recruiting time on a player who never reaches campus contributes to nice recruiting "scores" but poor on-field output.
- 3. We are trying to be as fair as possible. It is quite easy for us to identify CU's non-qualifiers but much more difficult to pick apart our foes' classes. In the interest of consistency, we pulled in all signees and will address on-field talent through two-deep comparisons this fall.
Position decisions were a little more difficult. We could easily pick the Clemson players who do not play the positions shown by the "experts" but, to be as fair as possible, I decided to choose one source's listings and stay with their position listings. In our case, the source ended up being www.scout.com. Any items that deviated from this (combined allocated positions) are noted in the individual article. This was deemed the fairest way to deal with this issue.
There were several items that I found (and that you pointed out to me) during this exercise that would improve the analysis. There were no flat out unacceptable items so, in the interest of consistency, we'll run these articles per original metrics and make appropriate adjustments after this series. Again, thanks for your insights here...we are constantly trying to improve and appreciate all the feedback we receive. I'll also keep this a live thread until this series is finished and will update as needed throughout this series.