Can recruiting rankings predict performance?
We spend so much time on college football recruiting. Ace works on it full time, and the Mathlete uses it in his models. If you don't believe how much MGoBlog readers care, check out the comments on Ace's post today.
February 12th, 2013 at 11:59 AM ^
I'm having a little trouble figuring out what's going on without seeing your model or results, but there are some pretty serious potential sources of bias. For example, programs that recruit the highest rated players probably tend to have better coaches, better facilities, better training staffs, more intimidating home stadium environments, more institutional emphasis on winning football games, etc. Those things should produce more wins, which would lead to your model overstating the impact of getting good recruits. Getting more talented recruits helps, of course, but it's hard to estimate that kind of thing too precisely with all of the potential confounding variables.
February 12th, 2013 at 2:19 PM ^
Those factors, such as better coaches, better facilities, certainly affect the type of recruits a school gets. Think of the recruiting ratings as some kind of aggregate indicator of all these factors.
In the big picture, I wasn't trying to isolate the effect of getting better recruits. Should leave that to the Mathlete. I just wanted to ask how far one could get based on the number of points Rivals assigned each team each year.
February 12th, 2013 at 1:48 PM ^
February 12th, 2013 at 1:58 PM ^
Yes, sure they can. Do they always, no.
There are several other factors determining a teams performance. Chemistry, coaching, health, character, etc... Personal performance is reflected in player rankings more times than not.
February 12th, 2013 at 2:54 PM ^
- Link to SI article and charts missing.
- I can't make sense of what you are saying without seeing that.
- Rank means nothing if the separation is small.
- Linear regression doesn't imply weighting the last 4 years but I don't know what you are doing.
- The system works for 46 out of 100 teams... hmm... how is that good?
February 12th, 2013 at 9:17 PM ^
First, the link.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/college-football/news/20130204/recruit…
Second, the method. I took a 4 year window of Rivals ratings and used regression to predict the next year's ratings by my algorithm. For example, the 2009 through 2012 recruiting ratings are fit to the team ratings for the 2012 season. The regression calculates a best fit to the team performance from 2005 through 2012.
Third, whether you think 46 of 100 team is impressive is up to you.
February 12th, 2013 at 3:36 PM ^
It's difficult to say much without seeing your data, but have you also considered maybe doing a correlational study with the same data? If you wanted to limit it to, say, the top 25, you would probably first have to determine which schools had the highest overall ranking over that period, or you could even do a random sample of Division I.
You could take those ratings and try to relate them to win percentage over the same period. I did it really quickly with the Big Ten for last year and it turns out R=0.78, so there may be something there (that's a limited sample, so that might turn out to be the anomaly, which would also be interesting). The only stumbling block would be what others have mentioned - accounting for potential bias in the ratings themselves (actually, if the R-value is consistently high, it might provide evidence of the bias - it might depend on how you would approach that).
February 12th, 2013 at 9:22 PM ^
I stayed away from win percentage because it doesn't account for strength of schedule. A 7-6 Big Ten team is different from a 7-6 Big East team. The team ratings I used account for strength of schedule. You could probably use any decent ranking algorithm though.
February 13th, 2013 at 6:58 AM ^
I find this to be very interesting and quite impressive (assuming the math works, which I'm not checking). Predicting preseason team rankings given a single variable vs. experts ranking teams using all information at hand and the single variable providing a better result almost half the time - I find that impressive. He's not claiming that recruiting rankings are the only variable that should be used or that recruiting rankings are even the best variable for ranking teams, just that this one variable is almost as good as the experts. Sure, recruiting has a lot of factors baked into the ranking, but so does most any variable (ranking coaches takes into a school's financial resources and commitment to football, the number of returning starters includes coaching, etc.)
I'm not suggesting, and I don't believe thepowerrank is either, that this one variable is the only lense through which to view teams in 2013. It's another way to view teams headed into next year. (The offseason sucks!)
For the nitpickers, there's probably ways to improve the analysis: study this over multiple years, weight the recruiting classes so the freshman class has less impact, rate the players on the roster, rate only the two-deeep or starters, exclude players that have left the team and incoming transfers, etc.
The bottom line, that few would argue, is that recruiting better players is likely to result in a better team.
February 14th, 2013 at 6:52 PM ^
It would be interesting to see if the Rivals rankings regression model matters more for offensive or defensive players or linemen vs skilled players.
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