recruiting

Now that we’ve officially entered the dead period after Spring Ball and before Fall Camp, its time to start digging into some of the details. As always if you have something you want me to look into hit me up in the comments or on twitter.

Using some new software and my recruiting database, I wanted to see what the recruiting scene from the last 12 classes (2002-2013) look like on a map. Each BCS conference signee is shown  with a dot and scaled to represent the consensus rating of that recruit. The larger the dot, the more highly regarded the recruit was. Metro areas have tons of recruits piled on top of each and are difficult to distinguish, but I think there are plenty of interesting things to pull from the overall picture.

The National Overview

B1G=Blue, SEC=Black, B12=Red, P12=Yellow, ACC=Teal, former Big East=Pink

Unsurprisingly the recruits center largely around the geographies of the schools they are attending. Florida is a jumbled mess across all of the conferences but there are very clear boundaries by conference. It is also amazing that other than Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver and west Texas there are essentially no FBS football recruits between the Pacific coast and I-35. It will be interesting to see what happens with this as geographical boundaries continue to overlap with the ongoing conference expansion.

B1G and SEC Country

The B1G Footprint

Although the Big Ten footprint has largely stayed at home to play, there are regions that have had some pull from outside conferences. Iowa is naturally split and the Big 12 has pulled a few other players from Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Pac-10/12 has scored a couple of big Midwest recruits themselves and Eastern Ohio/Western Pennsylvania is a natural ground for competition between the Big 10, Pitt and West Virginia.

Even excluding Florida, the SEC looks to have held their territory about as well as the Big Ten has. The most striking thing to me, is how much coverage the SEC has across its geographic footprint. In the Big 10 there are areas of high population/recruit density with a fair amount of space between them. In the Southeast there are black dots everywhere. It appears as if every county is generating major college football recruits, not just the major metro areas.

[After the jump, a cartographer's dream]

[56 minutes]

Our podcast this week was actually recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Wisconsin game, but due to technical difficulties I couldn't get my hands on the file for editing until yesterday. So we've dropped the Wisconsin bit—which sucked anyway—and now present the nearly hour-long 2013 recruiting class overview and award presentation, which is something other than Ace and I moaning about how terrible everything is. Except for the intros and outros, which are. 

If it sounds different, the audio is lower-fidelity than it usually is, not that this is particularly important for two guys talking to each other. 

Topics!

Offense! Logan Tuley Tillman as Schrodinger's recruit. Sure things don't exist on the OL, but if they did they would be a couple of those guys. Derrick Green and such.

Defense! Taco Charlton as Logan Tuley Tillman. Henry Poggi as Mike Martin if Poggi can also become a slab of muscle more stone than man. Two flavors of cornerback, and Dymonte Thomas as no Michigan safety in memory. 

Gettin' my Rob Parker on. Not really, but we finish with some gimmick superlative type stuff. 

Music. "The Rat," The Walkmen. "Caring Is Creepy," The Shins. Creepy breakup songs are always best for recruiting. The latter is a shout-out to Black Heart Gold Pants and their much-better-titled version of the Hello post. 

The usual links:

• Helpful iTunes subscribe link
• General podcast feed link
• Direct download link
• What's with the theme music?

also continuing: breathing

an annual Hinton tradition

wojo

The title is both a track off an upcoming Sufjan Stevens album and a rock-hard truth: for the first time in all the times I can remember, Michigan enters NSD without so much as a random three-star on the hook. They've got their 27 guys, are without late-flip drama, and we're reduced to watching Ole Miss inexplicably reel in five star after five star for reasons related to Eli Manning and apple pie*, I'm sure.

Anyway, for reasons of holy pants that basketball game and ain't nothing going on, we're forgoing our usual monstrous all-day liveblog in which I answer the same question sixteen times for a more focused one. We'll kick it off at 1 PM and go through Hoke's 2PM presser; afterwards Ace will have some thousand-foot-view stuff for the people who don't care enough to bother except on one special day every year.

Wilton Speight's hello post will have to wait for tomorrow, I think. Not that we know much about him other than "is real tall, probably knows more about Thomas Jefferson than average high schooler."

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*[There's a certain faction that will cluck at you when you imply that what's going on with Ole Miss's recruiting is suspicious. SAT analogy time: Ole Miss : recruiting :: 37-year-old baseball player having career year : steroids. I'm taking this recent Bill Simmons column and applying it to a new domain. The point at which schools received the benefit of the doubt is long gone.]