Recruiting Success By Conference

When I first set out to look at the recruiting data from Rivals, there were some things I expected. I expected teams like OSU and USC to do well. (They recruit well AND win.) I strongly suspected that Notre Dame would perform poorly. I believe their classes to be over-rated, and don't even get me started on Weis. But I did not expect to discover that North Carolina was where talent went to die. I was also somewhat surprised how bad the SEC did as a conference--they recruit well and win, but the numbers suggest they are either over-hyped on the recruiting class end, or they don't win enough, despite Florida's national championship.


Recall that the Rank Index is the Recruiting Rank divided by the winning percentage rank for games played 2002-2008.

Conference	AVG Rank	AVG Index	Adj.AVG Index
MWC	37.11	2.50	1.97
Big East	40.63	1.92	1.73
WAC	34.89	5.67	1.73
MAC	41.92	1.48	1.35
Big Ten	62.09	1.21	1.15
Sun Belt	44.88	1.19	1.12
C-USA	53.33	1.09	1.09
ACC	70.83	1.06	0.95
Big XII	74.83	0.98	0.88
PAC-10	79.30	0.77	0.69
SEC	101.75	0.45	0.44

The average rank is where the teams in that conference were ranked in my original analysis. The Average Index is the average rank index for all the teams in that conference, whereas the adjusted average index is the average of the teams except for the highest rated and lowest rated teams. For instance, by dropping out Boise State's insanely high Index of 38, the conference average drops from 5.67 to a reasonable 1.73.


The problem with the SEC is probably related to over-hype. Their recruiting classes are consistently higher throughout the conference than any other conference. Teh numbers bear this out:

Conference	Average Recruiting Rank
SEC	21.33
PAC-10	31.00
Big XII	32.17
ACC	33.83
Big Ten	39.82
Big East	56.63
C-USA	80.75
MWC	80.89
WAC	94.56
Sun Belt	98.75
MAC	99.54

In order to achieve a rank index of 1, the conference as a whole would have to have winning records ranked about 21st overall. And while the usual suspects do well--Florida, LSU, Alabama . . . the conference as a whole only ranks about 47th in terms of win-loss percentage. Here's the overview of the conference:

	SEC	PCT	PCT Rank	Rivals	Index
76	Auburn	71.61	13	11	0.85
85	Vanderbilt	32.26	101	70	0.69
87	Kentucky	44.86	81	55	0.68
93	LSU	77.98	7	4	0.57
100	Tennessee	63.31	26	12	0.46
103	Alabama	60.96	31	13	0.42
106	Arkansas	55.71	48	19	0.40
110	Georgia	80.35	6	2	0.33
113	Mississippi State	30.87	107	33	0.31
114	Mississippi	46.00	76	20	0.26
116	Florida	73.05	12	3	0.25
118	South Carolina	51.66	61	14	0.23
101.75	Averages		47.42	21.33	0.45