BLOG: National Guessing Day - What can we really tell from NSD recruiting rankings?

[emann]

If anyone is really bored at work today, here you go. This is a blog entry about National Signing Day and the puffed-up team by team rankings. It's much longer than typical stuff, so I apologize for that off of the bat. Interested to get some of your takes on it. Thanks for reading.

National Guessing Day (http://elliotmann.tumblr.com

 

[RodentRampage]

He implies that players think of Minneapolis as a "Cold Omaha", and then has a link to some other blog post which talks about the phrase, but that blog doesn't say a thing about players. The "Cold Omaha" phrase was always in reference to professional sports teams, that if we didn't have Twins and the Vikings, people would think of the Twin Cities as a "Cold Omaha", because Omaha is another city without major league teams. It never meant that the Twin Cities were just like Omaha only cold, while Omaha is larger than Minneapolis, the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area is much larger than the Omaha Metropolitan Area.

 

[emann]

He implies that players think of Minneapolis as a "Cold Omaha", and then has a link to some other blog post which talks about the phrase, but that blog doesn't say a thing about players. The "Cold Omaha" phrase was always in reference to professional sports teams, that if we didn't have Twins and the Vikings, people would think of the Twin Cities as a "Cold Omaha", because Omaha is another city without major league teams. It never meant that the Twin Cities were just like Omaha only cold, while Omaha is larger than Minneapolis, the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area is much larger than the Omaha Metropolitan Area.

I linked "cold Omaha" to that post because it contained the etymology of the phrase, which is linked to Hubert H. Humphrey.

 

[emann]

The post is a much deeper than the "Cold Omaha" thing, here is the first portion:

In early 2008, the Minnesota Golden Gophers had just wrapped up an atrocious season, one that would have gone completely winless if not for an early season win in triple overtime against an under .500 team from the Mid-American Conference. But that February, the Gophers were sprinkled between Texas A&M and Virginia Tech within the top 25 recruiting rankings. Coach Tim Brewster and company brought the excitement of the Dinkytown faithful to a level never before reached in the short history of the Rivals.com lists on National Signing Day.
Even though Minnesota was once the class of major college football, those championship banners were raised decades ago, long before these incoming 17 and 18 year-olds had been born, and likely before even their parents had been born. It was what Brewster, an unproven hire, had been brought in to accomplish, to bring in players that otherwise tabbed Minneapolis as a cold Omaha. The dandy of a recruiting ranking, which seemingly dominated anything that Brewster’s predecessor Glen Mason accomplished recruiting wise, had Big Ten and Gopher football message boards alike buzzing.
“This class is phenomenal. Minnesota has to be one of the biggest stories nationally,” said Tom Lemming, possibly one of most well-known and thorough national recruiting analysts, at the time to the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis. “I believe Tim is one of the Top 10 recruiters I’ve ever seen and he’s showing why with this class. Recruiting is all about perception and nobody does it better than Tim. I’ve been doing this since 1978 and this is the best class that Minnesota has brought in when you talk about pure athletes.”
For those who aren’t ardent Saturday football fans, you’ll probably remember Lemming from a brief cameo in the film adaption of “The Blind Side.” The reviews poured in from other recruiting analysts as well, from credible sources who make a 9-to-5 living off of scouting players and analyzing them for college programs.
“There’s no question that Minnesota’s class goes down as the biggest surprise in the nation for me,” said Jeremy Crabtree, Rivals.com national recruiting analyst. “We knew he could recruit when he was at Texas and other places, but the job that he did this season with the results on the field is amazing. He’s surrounded himself with great assistant coaches that work just as hard as he does, and the end result is a class chock-full of impact guys that should help them out right away.”
Meanwhile, Zach Johnson, recruiting editor for Rivals-based GophersIllustrated.com, told a Star-Tribune reporter that it was the best recruiting class in Golden Gopher football history.
At his first press conference a few years earlier, Brewster promised such recruiting victories, which he said would not only leads to wins against the hated Wisconsin Badgers and Iowa Hawkeyes, but also to the Rose Bowl, the “Granddaddy of ‘Em All.”
“We’re going to win the Big Ten championship and we’re going to take the Gopher Nation to Pasadena,” Brewster said at the time to the cadre of reporters. “That’s my dream, that’s my goal and that’s my belief. It will happen here sooner rather than later.”

Brewster’s first true class delivered according to the experts. The Gophers now had the athletes to compete with upper echelon schools. But less than three years later, two offensive and defensive coordinators each had abandoned ship, the Gophers never won more than seven games in a season and Brewster was fired in the midst of a 1-6 season. Even in the seven win season when the team had briefly reached the top 25, they ended the season on a five-game losing streak, including a 55-0 loss to Iowa at home. During his tenure, Brewster’s team never beat a team ranked in the top 25; they hadn’t even beaten a rival in a trophy game. Brewster inherited a team that played Texas Tech in the Insight Bowl. He left a team that, at the time, hadn’t won a Big Ten conference game.
What happened? Is a recruiting ranking an indicator of future success? Were the Gophers victim to some unlikely circumstances or was Brewster unable to coach these talented players to their potential?
Why didn’t the Gophers improve their Big Ten position?

Want more? Click here.

 

[50PoundHead]

I want to commend Elliot on a solid piece. I have come to have little faith in anything Tom Lemming says. I believe that the "star system" is reasonably accurate short-hand for who the most sought-after players in the country are and a decent gauge of their current (and often projectable) level of talent.

The problem is that there's so much spinning that contributes to the star system, both before and after the star level is calculated, that it's hard to look at it as gospel, especially from the 3-star level and down (I think the 5- and 4-star guys are pretty well established and the statistics show that most contribute at the college level) where word-of-mouth and ideas like "If a great recruiter like Brewster or Orgeron is interested in this guy, he must be good!" enter into the calculus and the various ranking services.

For me, the key to being consistently competitive is to get your recruits into a 5-year cycle where you are getting guys who fit your system on campus and remaining in the system for the duration of college. Sprinkle in studs and effective situational guys on top of a solid base and you should go somewhere.

 

[emann]

I want to commend Elliot on a solid piece. I have come to have little faith in anything Tom Lemming says. I believe that the "star system" is reasonably accurate short-hand for who the most sought-after players in the country are and a decent gauge of their current (and often projectable) level of talent.

The problem is that there's so much spinning that contributes to the star system, both before and after the star level is calculated, that it's hard to look at it as gospel, especially from the 3-star level and down (I think the 5- and 4-star guys are pretty well established and the statistics show that most contribute at the college level) where word-of-mouth and ideas like "If a great recruiter like Brewster or Orgeron is interested in this guy, he must be good!" enter into the calculus and the various ranking services.

For me, the key to being consistently competitive is to get your recruits into a 5-year cycle where you are getting guys who fit your system on campus and remaining in the system for the duration of college. Sprinkle in studs and effective situational guys on top of a solid base and you should go somewhere.

Agreed -- I think the level of groupthink in college football recruiting is very high. If a helmet school starts sniffing around a player, everyone rates them a bit higher. If anyone offers a scholarship to a relative unknown, the sites will add a star. (From one star to two star.)