Uncommitted Players by Region
With Mike Weber committed, there are very few top 300 players left in the Midwest. According to the 247 Composite there are only 4 left out of 25 prospects. The top guy in the Midwest, Terry Beckner, is uncommitted, with the next highest guy being Asmar Bilal at #198. This is way different than the West where over half the guys in the top 300 still uncommitted. The table reports the number of uncommitted players by five different regions. There’s one Canadian prospect that’s otherwise kept separate from the analysis.
One hypothesis as to why this is so is that relative to the number of top guys, there are more major schools in the Midwest than elsewhere. The correlation between the uncommitted rate and the number of available players per major school is 0.67. Of course, this is a perfect example of the wrong way to do statistics: look at the data and then design a hypothesis around the fact. Indeed, drop the Midwest and the correlation goes away. On the other hand, if you saw a scatter plot of the data you’d see that it’s actually the South that looks like the outlier; the Midwest and the other three regions draw a pretty nice regression line, while the uncommitted rate in the South looks low relative to the number of top players per major school. .
|
|
Uncom . |
247 Com. 300 |
Uncom. Rate |
Major Schools |
247 Com 300 per Major |
|
Midwest |
4 |
25 |
0.16 |
12 |
2.1 |
|
East |
13 |
35 |
0.37 |
9 |
3.9 |
|
Midlands |
17 |
54 |
0.31 |
12 |
4.5 |
|
South |
47 |
131 |
0.36 |
21 |
6.2 |
|
West |
28 |
54 |
0.52 |
11 |
4.9 |
|
Canada |
1 |
1 |
1.00 |
0 |
|
|
Total |
106 |
275 |
0.39 |
53 |
5.2 |
Midwest: Big Ten footprint when the Big 10 had ten schools.
East: VA/WV/PA and points north and east.
Midlands: ND south to TX. NM north to MT, ID + MO.
South: SEC footprint before the last expansion + NC.
West: Pac 12 footprint + AK & HI.
Disproving the hypothesese could be tricky' Jblaze disagrees for reasons unknown, yet again.
August 8th, 2014 at 10:50 AM ^
Thanks for doing this. Why anyone would neg some simple data and a properly-qualified hypothesis baffles me. I guess some people just like to neg.
That's interesting. I wonder if it's because kids on the West Coast wait to visit schools until they're paid for with official visits (during their senior seasons). If you live on the West Coast, it's really expensive to pay your way for a flight to the country's primary football regions. On the other hand, if you're in the Midwest, South, or Northeast, you can pretty easily drive around those regions to see what other schools have to offer.
Thanks for posting. To me, the most interesting information is your last column. Also, I wish you would explain how you determined which programs are major or at least name the schools. For example, for the midwest, I'm guessing you're including the traditional Big Ten teams plus ND. Is your 12th school Iowa State, Cincinnati, or some other school I'm not thinking of? I'm having a similar problem in each region you've identified.
August 11th, 2014 at 5:47 PM ^
ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, Pac-12, Notre Dame.
Schools outside of this that have a committed player in 2015 in a top 247-300 class in any of the four major recruiting services (247, ESPN, Scout, Rivals) or the 247 composite are Flordiay Atlantic, Bowling Green, BYU, Temple and Boise State with 1 each. It might be interesting to restrict that list to exclude some of the schools in the major conferences that don't seem to compete much for top guys.
August 10th, 2014 at 10:15 AM ^
Region and the average spot in the top 300. Seemingly every year the conventional wisdom says (a) the top kids are "all in SEC country" and (b) "all" the top kids are waiting until signing day or after an all-star game to announce on TV, which they don't get in July.
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