2013 Recruiting Analysis: Did the B1G Really Do So Poorly?

I, like some other folks out there, took a bit of umbrage with Urban’s open criticism of the other B1G coaches for failing (at least in his eyes) in their recruiting because the SEC has almost all its schools in the Top 25 and apparently that is the only thing that matters.  So I wondered what a closer examination of the results might say about how the B1G did comparatively to other conferences when considering more than simply the total score that a site gives based on number of recruits and their number of stars.  I wanted to look at where the recruits come from and how much of an advantage certain schools may have because the easiest hunting is always in your back yard. 

For a bit of background, I went to Scout and compiled the 2013 recruits (home state and Scout ranking) who committed to schools in the ACC, B1G, Big East, Big XII, Independents (BYU and ND), PAC12 and SEC.  As it turns out, this was a major pain in the butt.  I was planning to include the other 3 services in this my first foray into sports “analysis”, but based on the amount of time Scout took and considering I wanted to at least get something out in a week, that was not going to happen with completing time demands from a job and girlfriend.  Anyway, now that I have my excuses out of the way, down to it!

In addition to the location and ranking of recruits, I divided the US into conference footprints to get an idea of where the talent lies.

Chart?  Chart. (I always wanted to say that!)

As you can see, there is a hefty amount of talent in the SEC with over 1/3 of the 5*s coming from those states (BTW, I considered Texas as Big XII and Georgia/South Carolina as SEC although the SC designation could arguably be considered ACC country).  Here is the same chart with percentages which expresses the advantage more plainly. 

Well that just confirms the obvious.  Next I looked at how the respective conferences performed in the final tally with recruit signings.

As you can see the ACC…not so good and well Big East, but talk about stating the obvious.  This chart shows that the ACC only landed 7% of the 5*s in this class (according to Scout) whereas they had 14% of the 5*s in their conference footprint.  The other conferences pretty much performed close to where they should, save the Big XII 5*s .  But this still doesn’t tell the whole story since you can’t see if all the ACC’s 5* recruits came from the ACC footprint. 

Next I looked at how well conferences held on to home grown talent, let’s call it “retention”.  I’ll use the ACC as an example since this table is repeated for each major conference.

As you can see, of the 6 5*s in the ACC footprint (see first chart), only 1 signed with an ACC school (17%).  To prevent chart overload (is there such a thing?) I consolidated all the conferences results into one chart which is below.

I was a little surprised that the PAC12 did REALLY well in retaining their talent with the SEC doing the next best.  So looks like Urbs might be right that the recruiting didn’t go so well for the conference and the B1G needs to step up the effort.  But there is another side to this coin and it is something I called “poaching”. 

I defined poaching as a recruit who commits to a school outside of his hometown’s conference footprint (ex. Green from ACC land going to Michigan).  Again, I’ll use the ACC as an example. 

ACC schools inked 2 5*s from outside of their footprint from an available pool of 36 5*s which is 6%.  Again, the consolidated chart.

This time the SEC is top dog but the B1G did a pretty good job of poaching talent from other areas compared to the other conferences.  Interesting that the PAC12 is very strong at retention but not so good at poaching, but if you don’t need to hunt in your neighbor’s yard, why bother?  

I am left with a couple take aways from this.  First, the SEC has an unparalleled advantage when it comes to quantity and quality of recruits.  Second, the PAC12 is awesome at keeping talent who are in their footprint.  Those two factors combined create an uphill battle for the other conferences that are not flush with recruiting riches.  Although there is some truth to Urb’s statement, I disagree with the rather dire assessment of the B1G’s recruiting performance.  The retention of talent could certainly increase which should be a focus (Hoke’s emphasis), but the schools aren’t slouches when competing for guys who are not in the B1G footprint and in fact are one of the better conferences at doing so.

For even more detail, I examined the schools in the B1G because I wanted to see how significant the Big 2 - Little 10 (soon to be 12) is developing in the recruiting realm but I don’t think anyone will be surprised with those results.  However, this post is already too long and that could give me a chance to make follow up post if folks felt this was worthwhile.