football

5 star DT Eddie Vanderdoes is rumored to not be enrolling at Notre Dame:

Bruce Feldman ‏@BFeldmanCBS 17m

Could be good news for #UCLA. MT @SacBee_JoeD: Lot of speculation 5-star DT Eddie Vanderdoes may not be headed to Notre Dame after all

This continues the trend over the last 4 years or so where some of the top recruits at Notre Dame have either never made it onto campus or transferred within a year:

2013: 5 star Eddie Vanderdoes

2012: 5 star QB Gunner Kiel, 5 star CB Ronald Darby, 4 star WR Davonte Neal, 4 star CB Tee Shepard, 4 star WR Deontay Greenberry, 4 star OL Taylor Decker, 4 star WR Justin Ferguson

2011: 5 star DE Aaron Lynch

2010: 5 star DE Chris Martin, 4 star OL Matt James, 4 star RB Giovani Bernard, 4 star DE Blake Lueders

2009: 4 star WR Shaquelle Evans

Shane has yet to even suit up for Michigan and his signature is apparently already worth $250, although I doubt the guy will get that.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Michigan-SHANE-MORRIS-Signed-Autographed-Footbal...

I know there are many video game players on the board. We also know the many complaints of our fair leader about the current NCAA Football game (damn anti-Chris Graham super linebackers with their great hands and leaping ability). Here's your chance for change.  This company has a kickstarter to create a new college football video game to launch prior to the 2014 season. Check out the link and watch the video to see how this one will be different. For those that don't know, Austin is a center for video game production. I have questions about the ability to get the NCAA licensing, but I do know this is a legit program.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1318442419/college-football-championship-game

Updated Rivals 100 (Rivals 55 in USA?) to be released within the hour. It's out - http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/recruiting/rankings/rank-3235

They've teased 4 new 5*-

OT Damien Prince (favours FSU)

ILB Raekwon McMillan (OSU favoured)

OT Quenton Nelson (ND commit)

RB Joe Mixon (USC lean)

http://rivals.yahoo.com/video/recruiting-football/rivals100-four-new-5-s...

Targets and notables:

1. Hand
2. Peppers 
7. Andrew Brown
9. Adoree Jackson
23. Malik McDowell
35. Damon Webb (OSU)
49. JuJu Smith
56. Alex Bars (ND)
57. Drake Harris (Michigan)
81. Artavis Scott
97. Jamarco Jones
 

From gathering various bits of information around the Twitterz, it sounds like DT Andrew Brown is visiting in the next couple months.

Rivals hints at it with his photo on TheWolverine.com on Rivals:

http://michigan.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1507334 ($)

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/recruiting/player-Andrew-Brown-116735

#6 Nationally, #1 DT on Rivals.

Hoke and company doing work in the Mid-Atlantic states.  Yes, please.

USING RIVALS’ STAR RATINGS TO LOOK AT BIG TEN RECRUITING: 2002-2013 CLASSES

I decided to take a look at Rivals.com and the star ratings that they give recruits to come up with an approximation of relative recruiting success over twelve classes (2002-2013) in the Big Ten. To see where Nebraska may have fit in (we can’t really know how different it would be if they’d been in the conference for the whole period studied), I included them as well.

So, including Nebraska, Rivals had ratings on 3,160 recruits from the period 2002 to 2013. Here is what the relative distribution looks like:

So, as you will note, 5-stars and to a lesser extent 4-stars are something of a rare commodity in the Big Ten historically, accounting for only about 1/5^thof all recruits by their data. One thing that is interesting, and you can see this in more detail later, is just how far above the conference norm Michigan and Ohio State tend to sit.

The one thing that should jump out here is the percentage of five and four-star recruits that go to the traditional “Big Two”, if you will. In fact, about 44% of all players ranked four and higher end up at either Michigan or Ohio State. You can also see how sparse those same rosters tend to be when it comes to two-star recruits – by Rivals’ system, Big Ten teams not in Ann Arbor or Columbus attract nearly 98% of the two-star talent.

For all 3,160 players whose ratings I dumped from Rivals’ database, the grand mean star rating is 2.93, but individual teams obviously have had varied success. Here are the team means for the period from 2002 to 2013.

Including Nebraska as a point of some comparison, they would have been quite competitive in Big Ten recruiting circles regardless, so it seems. Here, they are in possession of the third-highest average. In fact, four teams have managed to recruit at or above a “three-star” in those twelve classes. Five teams have managed to stay above the grand mean of 2.93 – Ohio State, Michigan, Nebraska (had they been part of the Big Ten for the whole period), Penn State and Michigan State. Michigan State’s numbers spike with the Dantonio years, as you might expect, or otherwise this doesn’t happen, I think.

Here is the conference mean for each year as well:

So, the trend is actually upwards, ever so slightly. The net increase in the average star rating over this period is about 7%, which doesn’t seem like much. It would be interesting to compare this to other conferences in a further diary. I suspect some of this – as it is subjective – has to do with perhaps a steady-state perception of the Big Ten.  I really don’t know – that’s speculation on my part.

A more meaningful comparison between each team and the conference mean for a given year will appear shortly, but this now allows us to look at another intriguing phenomenon.

So, here again we see the relative inequities in where the talent tends to go in the Big Ten, with two schools having never experienced a year above the conference mean rating, one school having managed this feat only once and three schools having achieved this only twice. Of course, on-the-field success is a different story from year to year with some of these teams too, but it seems to illustrate that several teams in the conference do indeed get along with less, if these ratings are any indication. Obviously, there is overlooked or underrated talent, so it is ultimately subjective and not 100% accurate by any means.

So, how did each team fare against the conference mean each year? Here’s what that looks like for each team:

Here’s the whole conference on a rather non-descriptive but somewhat telling chart. You can see Michigan and Ohio State flying comfortably above the rest of the conference for the most part:

Here are some comparisons with select teams. Why Indiana? I was inspired somehow:

TL;DR CONCLUSION:

Like many of these diaries that I do, the driver is for the reader to draw their own conclusion about what they see. Rivals’ data was the easiest to categorize, which is why I used it here, but they aren’t the only ranking service, nor are stars the sole measure of who is in fact the better overall player. What was intriguing to me is how these ratings make the Big Ten appear when you dig into them a little, and the trends seem reasonably accurate to me.

OBLIGATORY: