turd ferguson

Those of us living near Lansing know the joys of being among Spartans, and with this being MSU week, I feel a duty to share those joys with anyone who might be unfamiliar.  These people bring sunshine to our lives, and we would be remiss if we didn’t communicate our appreciation before this silly little game.

Michigan State athletics programs have become pioneers in 21st-century teambuilding.  Concerned about the rapid decline of face-to-face contact, MSU athletes have repeatedly come together, in large groups, to contact the faces of their fellow athletes and classmates. 

Spartans are known to generously extend a hand to those in need.  They’ve developed a prison-to-work program seen by many as a model for how to reduce to an absolute minimum the time between prison and work.  Their athletic director moonlights as a volunteer career counselor and their football coach as a public speaking coach, offering their time even to supposed athletic rivals.  When one of their neighbors could use help just stretching his neck, scratching his eye, massaging his arm, or bludgeoning his face, a Spartan is always there to assist.

Sportsmanship is always the Spartan’s highest priority.  When an opposing player gets hurt, MSU students come together to let that player know that he is as beloved and cherished as a sweet family pet.  If a fan, who’s totally a CMU grad or something, gets unruly, the community reins him in immediately, nobly protecting our great-great-great-grandmothers along the way.  The head basketball coach once even sat out a game in honor of NCAA rules.

A Spartan is green at his core, concerned about the environmental dangers of letting too many sofas eventually reach our landfills.  He understands the medical importance of concussion research and bravely puts his student-athlete in harm’s way just so the rest of us can see what happens.  He advocates for the consumer who is so often trampled upon by uncaring corporations.  He even protects college athletics from the unsavory members of society by constantly reminding us that the only people entitled to enjoy college sports are those with college degrees.

So to all of the Michigan fans out there, please, if you have an opportunity to thank a Spartan this week, do it.  The world just wouldn’t be the same without them.

[bump: we got guys yo]

This might be one of those things that's cool only to me, but the chart below depicts the current rankings of prospects in the class of 2013.  I used 247's composite rankings, which combine those from 247, Rivals, Scout, and ESPN.  Each colored sliver represents a committed recruit.  The total number of commitments for each program is provided next to the school's name.

I've binned these by 50s, so there's some rounding going on.  Basically, if you look under the "1" on top, you'll see a sliver for every player ranked 1-50 in the national composite rankings.  OSU has four of those, Penn State has two, and we have one (Morris).  The last group ("1001+") represents recruits ranked 1000 or lower or, in almost all cases, unranked recruits.

I had to be creative with the rankings for a few recruits (e.g., JC guys), but I just figured out where their ratings would place them on the regular high school recruit scale.

A few of my observations:
 

• Big two, little ten.  For real.  Those two programs are drawing from an entirely part of the distribution from the rest of the Big Ten programs.
   
• These group together pretty nicely.  It looks like there are basically three tiers.  The top tier is Michigan and OSU.  The second tier is Nebraska, Wisconsin, Penn State (for now at least), MSU, and Iowa.  Then there's everyone else.
   
• Someone should make sure that Minnesota's planning to continue its football program.  One key ingredient for a football program: football players.  Minnesota, you might want to get a few of those.

Having done something similar last year, I just combined the Scout, Rivals, and 247 football recruit rankings into one.  The purpose is to help sort through the confusion that comes from seeing three different rankings for each kid.  I provide a little analysis below the rankings, but I’ll leave the rest to you.

What to know about how I did this:

I started with the Scout 300, Rivals 250, and 247’s top 247 and removed all of the prospects who were ranked by only one of them.  Therefore, every prospect below appeared on at least two of those three lists.  The reasons for this are that: (1) it keeps the rankings to a manageable size and (2) if only one site really likes a prospect, it might just be an outlier.

If a kid was ranked by two services but not the third, I imputed a ranking for the third service.  To do this, I added 100 to the lowest ranking provided by that service.  In other words, a kid who wasn’t ranked in Scout’s top 300 received a Scout ranking of 400; a kid who wasn’t ranked in Rivals’ top 250 received a Rivals ranking of 350; and a kid who wasn’t ranked in 247’s top 247 received a 247 rank of 347.

I took one more step before finding the average ranking for each prospect.  I incorporated the median ranking across those three services.  Therefore, a prospect’s mean ranking, which is the basis of these rankings, comes from an average of his real/imputed Scout ranking, Rivals ranking, 247 ranking, and the median of the three.  I added the median to mitigate the effect that one outlier ranking would have on a prospect’s mean.

Okay, enough with that. 

Edit: I just added position rankings.  Note that I used the positions listed by Scout.
 

The rankings:

Notes:

Michigan currently has commitments from:

#15 Shane Morris (#2 QB)
#36 Dymonte Thomas (#4 S)
#38 Kyle Bosch (#4 OT)
#53 Chris Fox (#1 OG)
#64 Patrick Kugler (#2 OG)
#97 Logan Tuley-Tillman (#9 OT)
#125 Michael McCray (#11 OLB)
#145 Wyatt Shallman (#1 FB)
#151 Jake Butt (#6 TE)
#186 David Dawson (#7 OG)
#187 Taco Charlton (#18 DE)
#221 Jourdan Lewis (#21 CB)

Gareon Conley and Jaron Dukes aren’t listed because they were only ranked by one service (Scout).  Khalid Hill isn’t currently ranked by any of them.

Here are the programs with the most commitments from this group - along with Big Ten programs (& Notre Dame) with at least one commitment:

Michigan – 12
Texas – 10 (but very top-heavy)
Alabama – 8
Texas A&M – 7
Florida – 6
Georgia – 5
Ohio State – 5
-----------------------
Penn State – 3
Michigan State – 1
Notre Dame – 1

Let me know if anything seems wrong or strange.

I've been thinking about rivalries lately, as I think they're among the most endearing features of college sports.  It struck me that there are some similarities across rivalries - often rooted in the types of schools involved - that enable a rough classification into certain types of rivalries (and the feelings involved).

These aren't perfect or complete, of course, and I'm sure that I've mislabeled a couple of the rivalries here, but just for fun...

Rivalry Type #1:  The one-game season

For some schools, a rivalry game is of such importance relative to the rest of the schedule that these season-defining games will be the one event that energizes each school’s fan base.  However, the animosity between schools is relatively mild, probably because people attend these schools for reasons other than sports.  The rivalry game affords students and alumni a fun annual foray into passionate intercollegiate athletics, but the rivalry is revered more than the rival is detested.

Examples:
-- Army vs. Navy
-- Harvard vs. Yale
-- Lehigh vs. Lafayette

Rivalry Type #2:  In-state “big brother” vs. “little brother”

If one rivalry type is inherently unhealthy for all involved, it’s that between two schools from the same state where one school seems almost objectively preferable to prospective students.  This is where the dominant school is both academically superior and more relevant on the national sports scene.  The dominant school’s attitude toward its rival, epitomized by Mike Hart’s “little brother” comments, is dismissive irritation, as the dominant school rolls its eyes at its rival’s obsession with the dominant school and delusion about the subordinate school’s national relevance.  The subordinate school’s attitude toward its rival, epitomized by Rufus the Bobcat’s premeditated attack on Brutus, is visceral hatred.  The structural danger in these rivalries is that the dominant school essentially holds a trump card – superior academics / higher admissions standards – so the subordinate school finds itself in an unwinnable battle for respect from its condescending in-state rival.

Examples:
-- Michigan vs. Michigan State
-- Texas vs. Texas Tech
-- Oregon vs. Oregon State

Rivalry Type #3:  In-state twin brothers

Similar to Rivalry Type #2 in that these rivalries often pit family members, friends, and neighbors against one another, these rivalries lack the clear hierarchy of the “big brother” – “little brother” rivalries.  The schools have similar attitudes toward one another, and the driving motivation is bragging rights, since fans and alumni of one school find themselves in constant contact with fans and alumni of the rival school.  Like Rivalry Type #2, these games tend to be much more relevant locally than nationally, but they’re true, fair battles that dominate headlines in that state as the rivalry game approaches.

Examples:
-- Auburn vs. Alabama
-- Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State
-- Arizona vs. Arizona State

Rivalry Type #4:  Neighboring state public schools

With a different dynamic from in-state rivalries, public schools from neighboring states can produce rivalries that are more unifying than divisive.  Here, daily contact with rival fans is less inevitable, and local newspapers, stores, television stations, and public figures openly cheer for one side over the other.  The competition is about athletics, not academics, since in-state tuition differences and preferences for in-state schools mean that students/alumni of each school commonly will not consider the other.  School pride and state pride often become intertwined, and the best of Rivalry Type #4 comes from schools with comparably (and highly) powerful football programs.

Examples:
-- Michigan vs. Ohio State
-- Texas vs. Oklahoma
-- Pitt vs. West Virginia
-- Florida vs. Georgia

Rivalry Type #5:  Academically strong public vs. private

One notable class of rivalries involves geographically proximate stellar schools, where one is public and the other private.  Many of our oldest universities are among our best universities, so these schools typically have long histories that include extended periods during which the competing schools had exceptional teams.  Today, these rivalries are defined by a mutual respect for the other institution and distaste for the type of person who would attend it.  Even when one school is arguably better academically than the other, the schools are different enough culturally – but each strong enough academically – that reasonable people could choose to attend each school.  The distaste for the type of person in one’s rival school is most commonly voiced by the public school, which finds its private school rival stuffy, entitled, uppity, and sheltered.

Examples:
-- UCLA vs. USC
-- Cal vs. Stanford
-- UNC vs. Duke (basketball)
-- Michigan vs. Notre Dame

I’m sorry to post again, but I think the improvements are significant enough – thanks to some intelligent feedback – to warrant a new posting.

Below is my attempt to aggregate the Rivals, Scout, 247, and ESPN rankings into a universal list.  The goal is to draw from all of the data available to create a single list that eliminates the need to juggle rankings, ratings, and stars from four different sites when comparing prospects.

First, though, I’ll describe the logic and process.

The Process

There are countless ways to do this, and none of them is perfect.  Importantly, even though I’m a Michigan fan, I never considered how this would look for Michigan before deciding how to do it.  I’m trying to make this as objective and sensible as possible given time and data constraints.

The first decision one has to make is whom to include.  In my first draft, I included only those who appeared in the top X lists for all four sites.  Others thought that requirement was too rigid, so I’ve relaxed it here.  The players appearing on this list appear in at least three of the four following lists: Rivals’ top 250, Scout’s top 300, 247’s top 247, and ESPN’s top 300.  This eliminates the “veto power” nature of the first rankings (and the related outlier worries), since two sites would have to leave out a prospect for him to be excluded. 

The next decision is how to rank those who make it.  The most straightforward way to do this is to take the average ranking for each prospect across the four sites.  In an ideal world, each site would rank every prospect so there would be no missing data.  That isn’t reality.  Therefore, I imputed rankings where they were missing.  Here’s how I did in for each site (this is boring if you aren't interested):

• ESPN – ESPN actually makes this the easiest, because they just rank thousands of prospects.   Every ESPN ranking here reflects ESPN’s actual ranking.
• Rivals – Rivals ranks its top 250 prospects and then gives elite prospects a star rating and a “Rivals rating” of 4.9 to 6.1.  Using those ratings – and especially the Rivals rating – I found the range within which a recruit must fall (rankings-wise) and gave him the middle value.  For example, Rivals has 222 guys rated a 5.8.  Of them, 163 appear in the Rivals 250 (and 59 do not).  That means that a prospect who receives a rating of 5.8 from Rivals but does not appear in the Rivals 250 must rank somewhere between 251 and 309.  For this prospect, I would impute a ranking of 280.
• 247 – Exactly the same logic as with Rivals except that I had to trust them when they said, for example, that about 300 prospects are rated 90 or higher.  (They don’t let you sort by prospect rating.)
• Scout – This one might seem unusual, but I think it’s actually pretty accurate.  Scout doesn’t have anything like a Rivals rating, but it ranks prospects at their positions.  For those outside of the top 300, I took their position ranking and imputed based on where ESPN had that ranked overall.  For example, Scout has Amos Leggett as its #22 cornerback.  ESPN has its #22 CB ranked #404 overall, so this is Leggett’s imputed Scout ranking. (There was an exception to this with two TEs that I can explain if anyone's interested.)

I hope that makes sense, and I’m happy to answer questions in the comments.  Please feel free to share feedback or point out errors.

Also, if one of these sites significantly changes its rankings in the next few days I’m going to kill someone.

The Product

A final note about ESPN

Several commenters in my previous diary expressed that they’d like to see these rankings without ESPN.  I don’t think there’s enough reason or evidence to dismiss ESPN entirely.  However, for those who are interested, here’s how some recruits would rank among the above prospects if ESPN were excluded:  Kalis (23), Washington (55), Magnuson (57), Ross (76), Dunn (79), Diamond (82), Richardson (104), Jenkins-Stone (106), Stanford (123), Burbridge (131), Pipkins (169), Strobel (181), Wormley (183), Bolden (201).  Of course, the list of prospects included would change if ESPN were ignored altogether.

Note:  I edited this since my original post to better utilize the ESPN data. Apologies if this makes some of the comments confusing.
 

Never having contributed anything of value to this site, I thought I’d take a shot at combining the Scout, Rivals, 247, and ESPN player rankings into one.  The goal is to come up with a straightforward way to compare elite recruits’ status with the ranking services (i.e. without forcing people to juggle rankings and star ratings from four different sites in their heads).

Aggregating across the sites is not easy, partly because of data availability and especially because of the different methods used by different sites.  There are countless ways to do this, with most requiring some kind of data imputation.  Since no data imputation strategy would be liked by all, I’m proposing a different method that requires no imputation.  Let’s call it the Veto-Based Aggregate Recruiting (V-BAR?) Rankings.  (Crappy name & acronym?  Check.)

The basic idea is that we restrict the rankings to players who appear in every site’s top X list (i.e. no one was unimpressed with the recruit) and then order them based on their average rankings across the sites.  It’s “veto-based” because any site can prevent a player from appearing on the aggregated list. 

I see two primary objections to this:
(1) It eliminates highly regarded prospects when only one outlier site is unsold on them.
(2) It gives excessive veto power to ESPN (and eliminates a lot of players) just because the ESPN 150 only ranks 150 prospects while the other services rank 247-300.

First, for (1).  This is just the design of this ranking.  Basically, to get on this list, there is consensus that you’re outstanding, and the average rankings tease apart just how highly you’re regarded.  Interestingly, for each recruiting service, one guy stands out, rankings-wise, as a glaring omission.  For Rivals, it’s Sheldon Day (#65 to Scout, #80 to 247, #144 to ESPN).  For Scout, it’s Amos Leggett (#104 to Rivals, #75 to 247, #95 to ESPN).  For 247, it’s Avery Young (#38 to Rivals, #13 to Scout, #119 to ESPN).  For ESPN, it’s Zeke Pike (#72 to Rivals, #33 to Scout, #18 to 247).  In general, though, there aren't too many really serious outliers.

Now for (2).  Giving ESPN excessive veto power seems problematic, especially since ESPN’s rankings are often questioned for their quality and objectivity.  Therefore, in addition to using the ESPN 150, I grabbed the next 150 players from ESPN’s recruiting rankings (link: http://espn.go.com/college-football/recruiting/prospects).  So we have rankings for 300 players from ESPN.

By my count, 147 players appear in Rivals’ top 250, Scout’s top 300, 247’s top 247, and ESPN’s top 300.  Here they are in order of average ranking across these four sites:

VETO-BASED AGGREGATE RECRUITING RANKINGS (as of 6/19/11)
(incorporates Rivals, Scout, 247, and ESPN)

Feedback welcome.