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Development or recruiting? My own take.
Jun 22, 2018, 3:11 PM
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(Long post warning...quoz is expounding on stuff all up in here. You've been warned.)
Everybody gets really worked up about recruiting. Which is important...but it's also only less than about 30% of the puzzle. Actually: 25%, by my math.
People also act like there's some science to the rankings, like there's no politics or promotion involved in the rankings, and that these rankings are as precise as the player ratings on their Madden consoles. You get the highest-rated team with the best players, you win all your games, right? And recruiting is just like that....
Well, no. Keep in mind there's one limitation first and foremost that never, ever shows up in recruiting rankings, and that is:
ATTITUDE. (Yes, I just used boldface. Take that, SportsSuites.) You can call this whatever you want - coachability, work ethic, learning curve, IQ, whatever - but whatever you call it, it's the most-important attribute a player can have. I say this as, among other things, a USSF-licensed coach who has taught kids all the way up to state level. Does the guy learn? Does he take hard coaching well? Does he get along with teammates or is he a cancer in the locker room? And guess what - this most important of attributes goes completely unremarked-upon (and unrated) by the recruiting services. They rate almost 100% off perceived physical talent. (The problem here is access...remark on a kid's nasty primadonna attitude, and see how fast his coach or school stops talking to you, and recruiting analysts require access to survive.) And it's amazing how often these attributes are likewise ignored by college recruiters who see the physical measureables and ignore the head and brain that control all of that.
The best college coaches don't just recruit the athlete. They filter out the bad apples - and there are a lot of them, unfortunately - and try to recruit the "right kinda guys", with an eye towards not just where that player is now, but where they will be in a few years with consistent work and quality coaching...and the right "culture" around them.
You have to get good enough physical talent, true. As they say, you don't win the Kentucky Derby on a donkey. But then you have to do something with it afterwards. And developmental coaching isn't factored at all into class rankings. I doubt Chris Peterson - who won a gazillion games at Boise before moving to Washington, where he has continued to win 10+ a year - has ever recruited a 5-star guy in his life, and not many 4-stars...but he wins an insane number of games, because he recruits the right kinda guys...and he can seriously coach him some football. Contrariwise, Butch Jones at Tennessee spent the last few years wasting more talent as any coach in America...well, Kevin Sumlin at A&M might have been close. Both of those schools out-recruited Clemson most years, the last decade. On paper. Five stars o' plenty. Wins, not so much.
So...those guys either did nothing with all that talent...or was all that talent as good as advertised? Both, I think. It's the old "zero sum" factor...multiply anything by zero, and the result is, well, zero. And a lot of the kids those schools recruited had highly negative attitudes...and had those attitudes all along, usually. A 5-star who won't work and won't learn is worth nothing to his team...and is a zero-star in reality. And a coach who can't coach can take even a good player and ruin them.
And then there's the whole "culture" thing. How your group or organization does what it does. A lot of coaches seem to have no clue about the whole "culture" thing, and the word "development" is just as alien to a lot of these guys. They regard players as fixed commodities. They don't trouble themselves to teach or encourage, they just sorta chuck their players into the churn and see who comes out on top, like beetles in a jar, and that's who plays for them. As for the losers (which is most of the locker room) well, see ya. Bobby Petrino at Louisville is maybe the worst at this aspect of the game that I've seen in awhile - he usually plays maybe 30 guys a game, if that - but Muschamp isn't far off. He just doesn't play his backups. Jake Bentley is the only QB who completed a pass for USC last year...like, what happens if he gets dinged? And you ever wonder why Louisville also always seems to crater at the end of the year, why USC under the Champ always seems to agreeably roll over for us, and why Petrino's (and, I suspect, Muschamp's) teams always seem to bleed talent faster than they get it until there is none left?
Well, culture. How they do what they do is kinda nuts, and certainly short-sighted. Us, we build players. All year. Often at the expense of lopsided scores and sometimes even comfortable wins.
Of course, all that defies a simple number and simple statistical analysis...which is why Clemson has remained the biggest outlier in recruiting-versus-wins for quite awhile. But then, we develop our guys (and in order to do that, you first must be willing to play them)...and we do our durndest to recruit the right kinda guys to begin with.
It ain't just "recruiting". It's "evaluation, recruiting, development, and culture" that determine how good a kid ends up being...and each component is probably a full quarter of the whole picture. So if you must do the math, do it that way. Take your "average star rating", adjust it for the ability of the staff to evaluate, then multiply it by how well the staff teaches and develops the technique and x's-and-o's of the game, and how the culture promotes accountability, physical development, chemistry in the locker room.
Your math ends up looking a whole lot different, you do it that way. Just FWIW.
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